More Art: Frank Bowling
Museum image: Frank Bowling, Elder Sun Benjamin, 2018; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim; © Frank Bowling; photo: Katherine Du Tiel.
(I'm not sure the original is this bright. My photographs pretty accurately capture his palette, but perhaps the museum lighting is less bright than whatever studio lighting was used to photograph Elder Sun Benjamin.)
The museum also states, “Building on SFMOMA’s major recent acquisition of Bowling’s Elder Sun Benjamin (2018), this exhibition features luminous and groundbreaking works that uncover the complexity and richness of Bowling’s formative years in New York,” said Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture. “It shows his lasting impact on debates around representation, abstraction and cross-cultural contributions to global histories of art from the 20th century to today.”
Bowling's most abstract paintings are intensely colorful and provoke a range of emotions. They often suggest a balance of opposing forces, masking the suggestion of tension behind their admirably attractive and desirable surfaces. He is less known and appreciated than he deserves, given his paintings' quality and emotional depth.
The art:
Early in this period, Bowling often incorporated stenciled outlines of South America and Guyana.
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Detail:
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A rich maroon-burgandy red, with a detail beneath:
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The SFMOMA upstairs lobby featured a very large poster of Frank Bowling moving a South America stenciled outline in his studio.
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Comments
After a lifetime of mainly expressing myself with words, my postings here will mainly rely on images. They will speak for themselves to some extent, but I'll usually add a few comments of explanation. I've taken photographs for decades, since the 1950's, inspired in part by my father's photographic skill. Four years of photo assignments and quality darkroom time eventually gave way to decades of casual and family picture-taking. I re-immersed myself when I left film and turned to digital.