DUBLIN.- IMMA presents a comprehensive retrospective of the work of seminal British artist Frank Bowling, his first major exhibition in Ireland. Renowned for his large-scale painted canvasses and his extraordinary use of colour, Bowling is a vibrant and prolific artist still making work today, in his ninth decade.
Named for one of Bowling’s celebrated ‘map’ paintings, Mappa Mundi highlights exceptional works from throughout Bowling’s career from the 1960s onwards. Through his ‘map’ paintings Bowling addresses issues of history and migration, both his own as a Commonwealth immigrant to the UK and latterly the United States, and broader mass movements of people, from colonial slaves through the ‘Middle Passage’ from Africa to South America, to socio-economic motivated migration. Bowling’s work on geographic and human movement has special relevance in a time where discussion of national borders and immigration has never been more urgent.
Having graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in the mid-1960s Bowling, along with contemporaries like David Hockney and Ron Kitaj, first exhibited widely in London and the UK where he garnered early acclaim for ambitious, large-scale works influenced by these contemporaries as well as Francis Bacon. Though previously not as widely celebrated as some of those friends and contemporaries, Bowling is now considered an essential figure in the discourse around art, identity and post-colonialism.
The decisive moment of Bowling’s artistic development was his move to New York in 1966. Bowling’s painterly experimentation had led him to consider how abstract painting could be invested with social, cultural, and personal meaning without losing the essential and formal principles of painting. This lead him to move away from relatively straightforward figurative representation into more abstract work concerned with questions of form and colour. In the post-war period New York had produced abstract painting of a certain scale and ambition, and this context, along with the size of Bowling’s New York studio, allowed him to work on the larger, often monumental scale works on view at IMMA.
Bowling’s seminal Map Painting series would preoccupy him from 1967 to 1971. With this series, he began to summon into his paintings some of the socio-political changes and radical cultural forces that were reshaping Western post-industrial society. The map series expressed his understanding of identity; being an artist of African descent born under colonial conditions in South America (in Guyana) and living in New York in the high tide of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. The image and representation of the map – for example the map of South America depicted in his work South America Squared, 1967, became a metaphor in Bowling’s work of home and exile. As an essayist (for Arts Magazine among others), Bowling also played an active role in the discussion around the institutional exclusion and media marginalisation of black artists. Included in the exhbition are material from the archives, including correspondence with the well known New York critic Clement Greenberg, exhibition catalogues, reviews, and photography all of which shed light on Bowling’s participation in the Black Arts debates in New York in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Alongside such milestones as being the first black artist elected to the Royal Academy (2005), the first black British artist to have work acquired by the Tate (Spreadout Ron Kitaj, 1984-86, acquired 1987), and being appointed an Officer of the British Empire in 2008, Bowling continues to produce ambitious and complex work today.
The exhibition at IMMA, which includes the series’ Great Thames, Bartica Flats and Wintergreens in addition to the Map Paintings, rightly identifies Bowling as a major figure in painting of the last 50 years. In addition to over 30 artworks it includes material from the Frank Bowling archive, and several films featuring footage and interviews with the artist.
Frank Bowling Mappa Mundi is organised by Haus der Kunst, Munich in collaboration with IMMA. It will travel to the Sharjah Art Foundation after the exhibition in Dublin.
