Frank Bowling at Aljira, a center for contemporary art, and Skoto - Newark And New York

Art in America, March, 2004 by Jonathan Gilmore

Although he trained at the Royal College of Art in London as a contemporary of David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, Frank Bowling has had a prime allegiance to the principles of color, scale and composition that animated the New York School. A painter of major talent, he has been underappreciated by comparison with his peers on either side of the Atlantic. These two shows--a four-decade survey at Newark's Aljira Center ("Bending the Grid: Black Identity and Resistance in the Art of Frank Bowling") and a smaller exhibition of mostly recent paintings at Skoto Gallery in Manhattan--amounted to a mini-retrospective of his work. Paintings ranged from dark, clotted, figurative canvases of the early 1960s, with biblical and folkloric themes, through stunningly refulgent abstractions of glowing yellows, orange and reds, to current works that often feature the same palette of hot colors as well as irregular sheets and scraps of canvas affixed to a support. These later constructions suggest Rothko-like Color Field paintings but frequently carry submerged figuration in the form of photo-silkscreens.

In several paintings begun in 1966 and reworked in 1999, the imagery is of a general store owned by Bowling's mother during his adolescence in Guyana (he was born there, but has lived most of his adult life in Britain and the U.S.). In others, it alludes to a history both personal and collective. Middle Passage (1970), a 10-foot-high canvas of shimmering orange and yellow acrylic glazes, refers to the slave trade in its title; the shapes of the African and American continents are revealed within its layers of paint. But the work is also more intimate, evincing a barely visible, repeated photo-silkscreen of young boys--one of the many snapshots of family and friends that appear as palimpsests in many of Bowling's works. In vigorously textured canvases from the 1980s, flecked with metallic-hued yellows and greens, acrylic paint is pushed and pulled on the surface to create an almost sculptural relief. Composed on a human scale, these paintings feature vertical vertebraelike forms with a totemic air.

In the recent paintings incorporating canvas scraps, these layers of signification take on a more concrete form (enhanced by the metal staples and safety pins that hold down the pieces along their pinked and roughly stitched edges). In the 6-foot-tall Hangingonthelyme (2000), a blue field caps a bright yellow and orange canvas configuration, suggesting the meeting of sea and sand on a high horizon and, perhaps, colors and textures recalled from Bowling's travels in South America and the Caribbean. In King Crab (2000), as in many small works, the scraps of fabric suggest the pattern of a flag, while in Ashton'sfish--Spencer'scatch (1997), two nearly identical strips of yellow canvas hang horizontally on a red ground like a fish split into matching boned and gutted fillets. In these newer works, named after friends and personal experiences and often constructed from pieces of earlier cut-up paintings, Bowling intimates that art does not so much represent one's memories as collect and shape them into a coherent form.