Landscape has figured in Bowling’s work since the artist first began making his celebrated Map paintings – vast color fields depicting stenciled images of landmasses like South America or his native Guyana – while living in New York in the 1960s. Over subsequent years, he gradually moved away from cartographic representation to embrace the freedom of abstraction as a means to convey the emotive qualities and properties of color.
‘I have been fascinated by English landscape painting since my first visit to the National Gallery in London in the 1950s and that tradition is a furrow that I have ploughed for many years. The thing is, I don’t want to make Turners or Constables or Gainsboroughs; I always tried to avoid that. I want to make something completely new, something that no one has seen before.’
—Frank Bowling
By the early 1980s, having established a studio near the River Thames in the Pimlico neighborhood of London, Bowling had immersed himself in the purely abstract aspects of traditional painting, specifically the rich history of European painterly engagement with land, sea sky, and clouds found in the work of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. In response to this influence, the artist developed a highly personal abstract language of his own, in which vivid, dynamic flows of paint allude to landscapes – implicit, metaphorical, metaphysical – alive with distant but distinct sense memories of his birthplace.
Biter
Triangular Blue & Pinky
Cyclops
On the way
On the way too
Among the works on view in the exhibition, the monumental canvas ‘#4 to the Lighthouse’ (2021) features broad swathes of paint, some of which have been poured directly onto the canvas and mixed on its plane, rendering an expansive fluorescent field of color imbued with a lambent light. Other works on view, like ‘On The Beach’ (2017) and ‘Skyla’schoice’ (2014), feature found objects embedded in the surfaces of the paintings, offering glimpses of biographical detail that root them in the present moment.
#4 to the Lighthouse
At the Window
Ashton’smix
‘I firmly believe that paint carries its own light within it and I want my paintings to catch the light that exists in the natural world. My whole life I have lived near water – the Berbice river, the Thames, the East River. And I am sure that my eye has been influenced by the light over the water and the terrain in those places, whether that is New Amsterdam or London or New York’
—Frank Bowling
About the Publication
To accompany the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will produce an extensively illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Dorothy Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
‘Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975’ at SFMOMA
‘Landscape’ at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood coincides with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) exhibition ‘Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975,’ the first major US survey of the artist’s work in more than four decades. Traveling from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the exhibition will be on view 20 May – 10 September 2023, and will feature 11 additional artworks, including an expanded group of paintings made between 2018 and 2022.
Frank Bowling ‘Arrival’
On view now in Downtown LA and globally: Frank Bowling’s first digital artwork ‘Arrival,’ featuring a cascade of color. Celebrating the 70-year anniversary of Bowling’s arrival in London from Guyana in May 1953, The Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts presents ‘Arrival,’ an exhibition coinciding with The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III and the 75th anniversary of Windrush.
About the artist
Over the course of six decades, Frank Bowling has relentlessly pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. Ambitious in scale and scope, his dynamic engagement with the materiality of his chosen medium, and its evolution in the broad sweep of art history, has resulted in paintings of unparalleled originality and power. Bowling has been hailed as one of the foremost British artists of his generation. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, he arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962.
On view in West Hollywood
‘Frank Bowling. Landscape’ is on view now through 5 August 2023 at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood. Please visit our location page to plan your visit.
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