Frank Bowling: ‘More Land than Landscape’ at Hales Gallery

Frank Bowling, ‘Circle and Square Pink and Blue for Rachel’ (2019), acrylic, acrylic gel and glass on canvas, 215.3 x 354.3cm

Wallace Stevens, the poet laureate of Abstract Expressionism, had this to say about the creative act: ‘It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.’ Full marks for Frank Bowling, then, by that reckoning: the half-dozen works in his show at the Hales Gallery- an appetite-whetter for the long-awaited retrospective at Tate Britain- are uncompromisingly abstract; they change, as the emphasis shifts from canvas to canvas between the various tropes that Bowling has inherited from American High Modernism, repurposed and reinvigorated by the post-colonial, diasporic sensibility that he brings to bear on them; and as for giving pleasure: well, it’s been quite some time since Instantloveland felt this beguiled by a room full of paintings…

Frank Bowling, detail of ‘Jedimcgee’ (2019), acrylic, acrylic gel and found materials on collaged canvas, 206.6 x 291cm

They’re big. But despite their imposing size, and the vast quantities of poured paint and canvas collage that went into their making, none of these works feels ponderous, or weighed down by its sheer materiality. Rather, they move between modes with astonishing agility and great precision: there is surface as stain, and as skin, and as sediment; there is paint as matter (great gobs of gel-thickened acrylic, clustered on the surface like barnacles on the hull of a boat) and matter as paint (sheets of paper and card bearing printed plant forms, handwritten lists, torn scraps of fabric, and in the case of ‘Flying Creature out of Women’s Skirt Material & Cotton Duck’ of 2019, shards of cut-up credit card amongst the studio litter embedded in the pigment); all of it orchestrated and bound together by Bowling’s extraordinary colour, which feels suffused with memory and reverie, but remains rooted in, and returns to, the here and now of abstract painting.

Frank Bowling, ‘According to Lorca’ (2019), acrylic on collaged canvas, 183.6 x 293cm

Exhibition runs until 22nd June 2019.