Frank Bowling
Mother Approaching Sixty, 2003
Trained in European informel in the late 1950s in London, and in American abstract expressionism in …
Adopting an Abstract Expressionist vernacular since the mid-1960s when he moved to New York, Frank Bowling paints in a unique style that draws from abstraction and his Guyanese heritage. A peer of David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal Academy of Art, in London, his earlier work, which includes references to his Guyanese heritage, riffs on the work of Color-field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In the early 1970s, he began pouring paint directly from the can onto his canvases. This period heralded his interest in pure abstraction, which he continues to explore, though his titles or color palettes often reference the landscape of his native Guyana.
Trained in European informel in the late 1950s in London, and in American abstract expressionism in the 1960s in New York, Bowling’s sole photographic work and figurative portrait of his mature career is Mother Approaching Sixty. The painter hinted at figuration in the 1960s, in the form of stencils of Africa, and …
Adopting an Abstract Expressionist vernacular since the mid-1960s when he moved to New York, Frank Bowling paints in a unique style that draws from abstraction and his Guyanese heritage. A peer of David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal Academy of Art, in London, his earlier work, which includes references to his Guyanese heritage, riffs on the work of Color-field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In the early 1970s, he began pouring paint directly from the can onto his canvases. This period heralded his interest in pure abstraction, which he continues to explore, though his titles or color palettes often reference the landscape of his native Guyana.
