<div><p>Working under the radar for decades, the painter has recently landed a Tate retrospective, a knighthood, a spot on Hauser &amp; Wirth’s artist roster - and now, the €100,000 Wolfgang Hahn Prize</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Sam Cornish

Frank Bowling: A master abstractionist at last gets his due

<p>The title of Frank Bowling’s painting <em>Flogging the Dead Donkey</em> (2020) is a phrase the veteran abstractionist has often used to comment wryly on his seven-decade commitment to the medium. A Guyanese adaptation of the British expression ‘to flog a dead horse’, it means to continue an action with no chance of success. However vigorously you beat your deceased equine, it won’t carry you to market. As Bowling points out, you are more likely to find a donkey than a horse in Guyana, from where he emigrated to Britain in 1953, arriving at around the time of the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II.</p>

<p>Painting has been declared dead many times, from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the experiments with conceptual art of the 1960s. Bowling himself has experienced periods of hardship, organizing his own exhibitions and surviving on very occasional sales. Although he has never worked in total obscurity – having shown regularly in New York and London from the 1960s onwards – he existed, until recently, under the radar of the upper echelons of the art world. There must have been many times when his efforts seemed futile, particularly compared to the strength of his ambition. Now, however, <em>Flogging the Dead Donkey</em> can be seen to contain a note of ironic triumph. In 2019, there was a widely praised and popular retrospective at Tate Britain, following ‘Mappa Mundi’, an exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2018. In 2020, the year <em>Flogging the Dead Donkey</em> was painted, he was signed by blue-chip gallery Hauser &amp; Wirth, and knighted by the Queen in her birthday honors list. </p>

<p>The string of accolades continues. Opening this month at Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is ‘Frank Bowling’s Americas’, a major exhibition of paintings made during the decade he lived in the United States between 1966 and 1975. The exhibition will travel to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023. Organized in conjunction with the Boston display is ‘Revisiting 5+1’ at Stony Brook University, New York, a reappraisal of a now-celebrated exhibition of black modernists, curated by Bowling at Stony Brook in 1969. Howardena Pindell has selected a group of female artists to expand the original’s all-male line-up. Also opening in November is an exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, marking Bowling being awarded the 2022 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, and centered around<em> Flogging the Dead Donkey</em>. The painting has been acquired by the museum: the first work by Bowling to enter a public collection in Germany.</p>

<p>The inclusion of Bowling’s ‘Map Paintings’ (1967–1971) in the 2003 Venice Biennale, in a display of African and African diaspora art curated by Gilane Tawadros, was the first step in his late rise to prominence. In these grand paintings, stenciled images of the continents, most frequently South America and Africa, float within billowing sheets of intense color. The works had rarely been seen since a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Now, they have achieved near-iconic status. They are certainly Bowling’s most widely known paintings, even if they only occupied him for less than half a decade. Yet, the exposure in Venice did not have an immediate effect. For years afterward, until joining Hales Gallery in 2011, he continued to show with small galleries on both sides of the Atlantic. I worked at Poussin Gallery, London, who exhibited new paintings by Bowling in 2008. None were sold, although the National Museum of Wales subsequently acquired the wonderful <em>Caesar’s Plume </em>(1975).&nbsp;</p>

<p>Central to Bowling’s art is an astonishing aliveness to the mutability of color, as hue and material, combined with a flair for accumulating granular visual detail into dramatic, large-scale panoramas. He is a long-standing proponent of the disruptive implications of collage and the cohesive potential of freely flowing paint. His restlessly experimental and intuitive approach is grounded in a theoretical understanding of color and geometry. Ugliness mingles with beauty. These dualities are part of an approach that depends on combining multiple, often contradictory positions. His interests include English Landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, Classical African art, and the  abstract images of the early Russian avant-garde. A desire to avoid categorization at times comes close to contrarianism. He is attracted to irony and to directly conveyed emotion. He does not want to put forward a readily digestible message but, rather, to create something true to his own experience of the world, and his experience of art.</p><p>Bowling arrived in New York in 1966. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel, he quickly immersed himself in the city’s dynamic art scene. He brought with him rolls of canvas already screen-printed with imagery, primarily of his mother’s house and store in Guyana. These would form the basis of his first works made in America. In these early pieces, the impersonal tools of Pop Art are used to tell, or at least to hint at, a very personal story. By 1967, he had acquired a projector enabling him to create the stenciled images of his ‘Map Paintings’, catapulting his imagery from the personal to the universal.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Working as contributing editor at Arts Magazine between 1969 and 1972, he became an important figure in debates around the nature and political potential of Black Art. Bowling argued that Black modernists had access to a special signification, based on the disguise and evasions necessary to live in a racist society, but also that they deserved to have their work judged autonomously and afforded the same creative freedoms as their white peers. In 1971, he met Clement Greenberg, the start of a friendship that lasted until the end of the influential critic’s life in the mid-1990s. A few months after meeting Greenberg, Bowling dropped his work’s representational imagery and began to explore the possibilities of color, in 1973 arriving at his flowing, tightly controlled ‘Poured Paintings’. By the time he returned to London in 1975, he was making some of the most formal paintings he has ever created, despite their allusions to the upright human figure.</p>

<p>By focusing on these crucial years, the MFA Boston and SFMOMA exhibitions should draw attention to the fundamental productive tension that still drives Bowling’s art. How to attain the richness and potential universality of the sensuously experienced world – its light and space and stuff – while offering at least some acknowledgement of the complexities of individual experience, subject to the pressure of history and the pains and joys of social and private life. After decades dividing his time between London and New York, ill health has meant that Bowling has not visited America for several years. This has not diminished the power of his art and has even released a new nimbleness in his image-making, as if in compensation for his frailty. He has often said that at his age, it’s good just to be able to go to the studio, despite the aches and pains and keep pushing possibilities of pictorial invention, as his images continue to develop in the second decade of the 21st century.</p><hr /><p>Frank Bowling is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1153/Hauser-Wirth">Hauser &amp; Wirth Gallery</a>. </p><p>Sam Cornish’s ‘Frank Bowling: Sculpture’ was published by Ridinghouse in 2022 and launched with an exhibition he curated of Bowling’s paintings and sculpture at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich. He is co-editor of the John Hoyland catalogue raisonne.</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images:<br />Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1969–1970. &copy; Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS Artimage, London &amp; ARS, New York 2022.<br />Frank Bowling, Middle Passage, 1970. Menil Collection, Houston, image by Adam Neese. &copy; Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS, London.<br />Frank Bowling,&nbsp;Palimpsest I - Mothers House DarkRedGreen, 1966.&nbsp;Image by Charlie Littlewood.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist&nbsp;and&nbsp;Museum of Fine Arts, Boston&nbsp;&copy; Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage, London &amp; ARS, New York 2022.</p>

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