Frank Bowling, or the Odd Man Out
New Exhibition Opens at Alexander Gray Associates
By John Yau | Hyperallergic
I first began following Frank Bowling’s work when he was showing at Tibor de Nagy in the 1980s, and reviewed his work for Art in America in 1983. Born in Guyana in 1936, Bowling had a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. He was a contributing editor to Arts Magazine (1969–72); the first living black British artist to have a work acquired by The Tate Gallery in London when the museum added “Spread Out Ron Kitaj” (1984–86) to their collection; and the first black British artist elected to England’s Royal Academy of Art in 2005. (There are 80 members.)
Bowling’s career started out strong in America, but after some time his work began to be overlooked. He was included in the exhibition 5 + 1 at the Art Gallery of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which ran from October through November of 1969, curated By Lawrence Alloway and Sam Hunter. The title referred to the five Black American artists in the show: the sculptors Mel Edwards and Dan Johnson and the painters Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams. The Englishman Bowling was the “+1.” After starting out as a figurative artist, he began pouring paint in 1973; he has always been the + 1, the figure who doesn’t fit.
Bowling is an unacknowledged progenitor. His painting, “Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman” (1968), with its outlines of Guyana and the subcontinent of South America stenciled in white over three vertical stripes (green, yellow, and red), anticipates Kerry James Marshall’s recastings of Newman’s painting by more than 30 years. His collapsing together of politics and abstraction is just one of the advancements he made in painting. I mention this because the contributions that black artists have made to abstraction — in terms of innovation, challenge, and subversion — have yet to be comprehensively addressed by the art world.
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