Frank Bowling: Sculpture

Frank Bowling (b.1934, Bartica, Guyana) is attracting ever-growing international recognition as an abstract painter. This is the first publication to examine Bowling's art and ideas in relation to sculpture. An extended essay by Sam Cornish charts Bowling's interactions with sculpture since the 1960s, beginning with his important shaped canvas Swan (1964), which was first displayed with ribbons and an anchor hanging from it. The text also considers Bowling's time as an artist, critic and curator in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was involved with debates around the meaning of Black art, and the work of a number of African American sculptors. The book asks how seeing Bowling's sculpture, and thinking about sculpture more broadly, may extend our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship will also highlight the importance of sculpture to High Modernism, from within which Bowling's mature art emerged. Bowling is one of a number of High Modernist painters - including Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler - who also made sculpture, complicating widespread perceptions of High Modernism as a tendency associated primarily with painting. The book will be launched at an exhibition of Bowling's paintings and sculptures at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, in July 2022.