An extraordinary example of Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings (1973 – 1978), ‘Julia’ (1975) represents the artist’s innovative response to the challenges of formalism in modernist painting. Among the largest works within this historic series comprised of thirty-eight paintings, ‘Julia’ reveals the process of its own making—a flood of saturated pigments in striking chromatic variation flow against a stained ground of blue, purple and pink. Soft yet vibrant drips of pastel blue, green, coral and yellow are remarkably suspended in their descent to the bottom of the canvas, apprising the viewer of Bowling’s agile technique. Living and working between New York and London at the time, Bowling developed a contraption which he installed in both studios to produce the Poured Paintings with the aim of removing all signs of direct touch and expressionistic gesture. The lasting impact of this series was celebrated in an exhibition of his Poured Paintings at Tate Britain curated by Courtney J. Martin in 2012.
‘What gives these objects their extraordinary power, their startling visual impact, is another kind of unpredictability altogether. They are images of the natural processes which made them what they are … they are celebrations of their own dynamic paint-color fusions; they present us with opaque color as the representation of light, color as liquid matter in motion: they are themselves of and in the world, spectacular phenomena.’
—Mel Gooding [1]
About the artist
Over the course of six decades, Frank Bowling has relentlessly pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. Ambitious in scale and scope, his dynamic engagement with the materiality of his chosen medium, and its evolution in the broad sweep of art history, has resulted in paintings of unparalleled originality and power. Bowling has been hailed as one of the foremost British artists of his generation. He became a Royal Academician in 2005, was awarded the OBE for services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honors in 2020.
Artwork images © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer
Portrait of Sir Frank Bowling, 2020 © Frank Bowling. Photo: Sacha Bowling
[1] Mel Gooding, ‘Frank Bowling’ (London, UK: Royal Academy of Arts, 2021), pp. 83-86.
