by Alex Wells
We’re trained not to expect much from masters in late career. This is especially true when an exhibit’s billed “works on paper”—it seems like code for “things we found while cleaning out the studio”. However, in the case of British-Guyanian giant Frank Bowling, a recent show of works on paper at Marc Selwyn may be his best yet. Despite a career-long association with Abstract Expressionism, Bowling’s signature works—very much including his “map” paintings—feel less like expressions than abstracted evocations: there is a dense, almost finicky care in his brush strokes as if he is trying to bring some hypothesized shape into being. Here, however, we see Bowling at play—or at least at invention—seemingly responding with clever and gestural brio to paint’s own moods and manners. The result is fresh, informal, and liberating.
Here, at last, is the work of a man with nothing to prove, working, for example, with a wet and radioactive green as if in an improvised dance: in Up Three (2023) reverse drips and the texture of drying colors form an alien riverscape recalling both city and volcano, balancing speckled abstract detail with a wash of colored mist. In Beyond Sea Wall One (also 2023) the same colors fill a “sky” with an aurora borealis of hallucinogenic intensity over a lush, drowsily graceful intimation of cool-climate coastline.
Noughtnought613 (2021) uses the paint rings that form at the base of three cups or cans to build a composition of almost intolerable intimacy and fragility—the magenta bleeding from the rings like the memory of a wound while another, strictly localized burst of blue and blurred green strictly circumscribed by the far-right ring takes on an incongruous opacity like the color of an overpainted wall emerging from lost time.
There is some familiarity here—some of these works undeniably look like the colored glazes of hippie ceramics of decades-past and sometimes a stain is just a stain, but it is exciting to see a veteran hand seeking out what new can be built with well-worn tools.
Image: Courtesy Marc Selwyn Gallery