It’s always heartwarming when a long-ignored artist has a moment in the sun while still alive – for so many. it comes too late. It is even more important today: just when things were starting to look up for forgotten and overlooked women and minority artists after decades, even centuries of struggle, a new American administration decrees the death of DEI.
Those thoughts were inspired by “Frank Bowling: Collage,” an exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Paris. The 91-year-old Bowling cannot really be called a forgotten artist – he had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 and at New York’s MoMA in 1992 and a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. He has been a member of Britain’s Royal Academy since 2005 and was awarded the OBE in 2008 and a knighthood in 2020 (yes, you can call him “Sir”). A touring exhibition, “Frank Bowling: Americas” traveled from MFA Boston to SFMOMA in 2022-23.
In spite of that impressive record, says Ben Bowling, the artist’s son, who now manages his father’s studio after retiring from a career as a professor of criminology: “It has to be said that my father has been mostly ignored. He didn’t even have commercial representation in England until, I think, 2005.”
The Hauser & Wirth show is the artist’s first solo exhibition in France, and while his works are part of important private collections like those of François Pinault and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, not a single one has been acquired by a public museum in France.
A walk through the current exhibition shows how unjust that situation is. The gallery’s high-ceilinged ground floor, with its tall arched windows, glows with the masterly and sumptuously coloured monumental abstract paintings Bowling made over the past two years for this exhibition, creating a kind of “cathedral” of painting.
For Bowling, exhibiting in Paris has always seemed like the ne plus ultra for an artist. Two years ago, when he saw photos of Hauser & Wirth’s Paris gallery-to-be, where his show would be held, he defied his age and frail health and set to work on a group of new site-specific paintings, most of them 4 meters tall, some of them reprising techniques he has used in the past, like collage or “pouring” paint onto a horizontal canvas from a height of 2 meters, then standing it up to let the colors flow down.
Some of the collages seem to be “stitched” together with staples, perhaps a faraway echo of time spent with his mother, Agatha Elizabeth, who was a dressmaker and a milliner in New Amsterdam, Guyana.“He’s very aware of the work as material, as cloth, as a physical kind of work,” says Ben Bowling.
In many of these works, random objects have become embedded in the paint as Bowling works – here, a tobacco vape a family member dropped on a canvas in the studio, there a brush covered in orange paint or a piece of string straggling across the surface. “They disrupt the abstraction,” says Ben, “and bring his autobiography straight onto the canvas itself. It’s quite unusual, in a way, for an artist to be dealing with abstraction but then sort of throwing themselves straight into [the painting].”
Bowling, born in Guiana (now Guyana) in 1934, arrived in London in 1953. After graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962, his work, which combined figurative and abstract elements, was already being recognized. A sojourn in New York City beginning in 1966 helped accelerate his migration to pure abstraction. For many years, he led a transatlantic life, moving back and forth between London and the United States, where he taught at several universities. His recent works, made in his South London studio, where he paints every day, use thick impasto, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas and metallic and pearlescent pigments.
The exhibition is on show through May 25. Don’t miss this exceptional event, which continues in the upstairs gallery with older works by the artist. Hauser & Wirth will hold a “study day” on Bowling’s work on Monday, April 28, 2025. Led by art historians Altair Brandon-Salmon and Ed Kettleborough, it will include such participants as Ben Bowling, Leon Wainwright, Indie A. Choudhury, Ana Teles, Kate Keohane and Artie Foster. The public will be encouraged to speak openly about the works on view.
Welcome to Paris, Sir Frank!
See our list of Current & Upcoming Exhibitions to find out what else is happening in the Paris art world.
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