MANCHESTER.- Housed in Castlefield Gallery’s distinct architect-designed interior, this dynamic exhibition will bring together site-specific ‘spatial paintings’ by Jo McGonigal with Sir Frank Bowling’s sculptures as well as large-scale paintings for which he is renowned.

Each artist's practice has a highly imaginative and unconventional engagement with pictorial and physical space. As an exhibition 40 Years of the Future: Jo McGonigal x Frank Bowling will explore new ways of thinking about the relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture.

In his book Frank Bowling: Sculpture (2022), writer and curator Sam Cornish shares a story of Bowling receiving an invitation from Castlefield Gallery in the 1980s to exhibit his paintings alongside the work of a contemporary sculptor. As a response, Bowling provided the sculptures himself. This led to a solo exhibition of Bowling’s paintings, works on paper and sculpture at the gallery in 1988. Bowling made a series of welded steel sculptures largely put together from the by-products of an engineering firm next to his studio. Like his paintings, the sculptures have multiple influences, playfully mixing references from high modernism, classical African sculpture, cubism and Russian constructivism. Except for a tour of this work at the time, the public has rarely had access to Bowling’s sculptures since.

Jo McGonigal x Frank Bowling will offer a unique opportunity to experience Bowling’s sculptures. Encountering these pieces alongside his paintings will encourage exploration of the sculptural elements throughout his work. This includes the density of acrylic gel built up on their surfaces, his monolithic ‘poured’ paintings, and Bowling’s particular use of the marouflage technique and objects he collages into his works.

McGonigal’s paintings leave the constraints of the canvas behind, to interact directly with the environment in which her works are placed. McGonigal is interested in the interaction between painting and architecture as well as deconstructing the internal architecture of painting itself. Recent works involve applying layers of traditional gesso, normally used to prime canvases, directly on to the gallery walls before introducing lines of coloured chalk, piles of pigment geometric structures, textile and archaeological elements into formal abstract compositions. McGonigal combines these elements to enable a visual and sensory engagement with the tactile, spatial, durational and imaginative capacities of painting that activate the body as much as the eye.

Bowling’s interest in geometry is evident from the use of grids, spirals and other shapes defining space in his paintings and sculptures. This is not only a visual device, but it also speaks to universal laws of nature and form. McGonigal's use of traditional materials such as gesso (prepared using animal glue and marble dust), gritstone and chalk introduces into the gallery space material that has been produced over long periods of geological or deep time. Gesso is the unseen substrate below the surface, presented here as the subterranean level of painting, which contains invisible natural sediments. McGonigal is physically taking painting apart and separating its surfaces to bring the viewer closer to painting’s elemental relationship with the physical world.