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Descriptif du lot
Aglow with vivid, liquid colour, Irma Kurtz Visits Broadway (1975) is a beautiful example of Frank Bowling’s ‘poured paintings’. A broad stream of glossy pale yellow, marbled with pale pinks and dripping strands of black, runs down the centre. The background, stained directly into the canvas, shimmers from magenta to gold with the delicacy of a Rothko colour-field. The work radiates chromatic power and, in its pillar-like composition, has an almost anthropomorphic presence. Bowling began making his ‘poured paintings’ in the early 1970s. He would cascade his pigments from heights of up to two metres onto a tilting platform, creating a dialogue between control and chance and revelling in the variable, fluid properties of paint. The present work was painted in Bowling’s studio at 535 Broadway, New York: its title references a visit from the American-born, London-based journalist and broadcaster Irma Kurtz.
Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling moved to England when he was nineteen. He studied at the Royal College of Art alongside the likes of David Hockney, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty, and his early figurative works were personal and political, with the graphic edge of British Pop. In 1966, he moved to New York, drawn by its colour, energy and intensity as he sought new ways to make work. Imagery began to dissolve in Bowling’s large-scale ‘map paintings’—begun shortly after his arrival, and imbued with themes of displacement, hybridity and contrast—but the ‘poured paintings’ were his first true abstractions. They embody his dialogue with American modernism, making distinct formal advances on Colour Field painting. Bowling returned to London in 1975, but maintained studios between both cities through much of his career. The influential American critic Clement Greenberg—who Bowling said ‘was able to make me see that modernism belonged to me also, that I had no good reason to pretend I wasn’t part of the whole thing’—played a key role in his artistic outlook (F. Bowling quoted in M. Gooding, Frank Bowling, London 2015, p. 72).
While their final form is partly determined by chance, Bowling’s ‘poured paintings’ broadly share the vertical, centralised structure of the present work. In some late examples, Bowling masked off the poured gloss paint from the stained area to form a sharper contrast. In Irma Kurtz Visits Broadway, the inky blacks bleed and flare into the background; pigment swirls upward at the foot of the canvas like a waterfall’s splash. The work has a softly emotive and human presence. Bowling has said that he seeks ‘those moments when the material I’m using registers a spirit of the wholeness of extemporaneous life, of things. As a thing myself I was there, I witnessed, I felt, I know, and knowing is the work’ (F. Bowling, quoted in M. Collings, ‘Witness to Life: Bowling in the Studio’, Frank Bowling, exh. cat. Tate, London 2019, p. 69).
Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling moved to England when he was nineteen. He studied at the Royal College of Art alongside the likes of David Hockney, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty, and his early figurative works were personal and political, with the graphic edge of British Pop. In 1966, he moved to New York, drawn by its colour, energy and intensity as he sought new ways to make work. Imagery began to dissolve in Bowling’s large-scale ‘map paintings’—begun shortly after his arrival, and imbued with themes of displacement, hybridity and contrast—but the ‘poured paintings’ were his first true abstractions. They embody his dialogue with American modernism, making distinct formal advances on Colour Field painting. Bowling returned to London in 1975, but maintained studios between both cities through much of his career. The influential American critic Clement Greenberg—who Bowling said ‘was able to make me see that modernism belonged to me also, that I had no good reason to pretend I wasn’t part of the whole thing’—played a key role in his artistic outlook (F. Bowling quoted in M. Gooding, Frank Bowling, London 2015, p. 72).
While their final form is partly determined by chance, Bowling’s ‘poured paintings’ broadly share the vertical, centralised structure of the present work. In some late examples, Bowling masked off the poured gloss paint from the stained area to form a sharper contrast. In Irma Kurtz Visits Broadway, the inky blacks bleed and flare into the background; pigment swirls upward at the foot of the canvas like a waterfall’s splash. The work has a softly emotive and human presence. Bowling has said that he seeks ‘those moments when the material I’m using registers a spirit of the wholeness of extemporaneous life, of things. As a thing myself I was there, I witnessed, I felt, I know, and knowing is the work’ (F. Bowling, quoted in M. Collings, ‘Witness to Life: Bowling in the Studio’, Frank Bowling, exh. cat. Tate, London 2019, p. 69).