Frank Bowling on color, the sublime, and painting paradox

For six a long time, Frank Bowling has experimented with how private and political reminiscence will be sustained throughout the constraints of late-modernist abstraction. A solo exhibition, “Penumbral Light,” is on view at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich by way of August 20, and a serious survey, “Frank Bowling’s Americas,” will open on the Museum of Superb Arts, Boston, in October. Under, the Guyana-born, London-based artist discusses his abstraction as an encounter with one thing concurrently acquainted and surprising, compelled by a permanent fascination with what a painted floor will be.

I’M WORKING THROUGH WATERY TERRAIN in the mean time. I’ve been crossing the river Thames day-after-day to go to my studio for many years and I’m all the time working with water—buckets and buckets of it—to douse or spray the canvas. The works within the Zurich present all began out as ten-foot swathes of cotton-duck canvas soaked in boiling water and washing up liquid. Then I unfurl them on the ground of my studio in Peacock Yard and apply washes of shade, spreading wet-into-wet. Laid on the bottom, the floor of the canvas kinds a sort of shallow pool that lets the fabric unfold. I’ve been enthusiastic about mud slobs, like these you discover in Eire, across the coast of West Cork, the place you get little runnels of muddy water alongside the estuary when the tide has gone out, and the mud and muddy water is kind of glowing the place the water catches the solar. You would possibly assume mud is simply mud, nevertheless it has a sheen and there are all kinds of issues blended up in its slime: damaged glass, driftwood, flotsam and jetsam introduced in by the tides. My portray course of is analogous. It’s endlessly fascinating to see what occurs when the fabric hits the floor, how the paint will run and transfer, unfold and bleed, wet-into-wet, doing issues. Generally it feels prefer it would possibly simply become a muddy mess, and then you definately look once more—you would possibly simply catch a glimpse of it out of the nook of your eye, and there it’s! One thing magical has emerged from materials that you just haven’t seen earlier than. That’s what I’m in search of.

I perceive this revelation as a sort of a paradox, in that I see it as a second of recognition of the form or high quality of the work that was already there, or was already going to be there, even earlier than I began. I see every portray because the unpredictable, however someway inevitable, end result of my course of. It would sound loopy, however I believe that every portray was all the time going to prove the best way it does, despite the fact that I couldn’t have predicted it upfront. I’m typically requested about my intention as a painter and my reply is that the intention is there within the work itself. There’s no blueprint, no formulation, no planning. Like a child making an attempt to stroll: Her actions aren’t taught, they only emerge. It’s like that.

I’d additionally say that the current works are color-driven. I used to be very sick after the large Tate present in 2019 and once I bought again to work, I used to be notably enthusiastic about shade. Shade as a proper self-discipline. Again within the Sixties, I used to be in a research group enthusiastic about shade science, and I’m nonetheless there, what occurs when paint pigments and carriers meet and merge. I’m utterly open to new supplies. I moved from oil paint to acrylic within the Sixties, although I nonetheless use oil for last touches. I used to be utilizing numerous fluorescent paint again within the ’70s, I used to be additionally actually scorching on spray paint then. I typically use powder paints, particularly this gold powder that turns blue when it comes into contact with ammonia. And sometimes stuff will get chucked into the fabric—it began out with bits of glitz, you understand costume jewellery left round by my stepdaughters, or glitter, sequins, bits of cloth, bits of garbage from the hospital, stuff mendacity across the studio. I’m doing one thing with Chinese language tea proper now; the tea leaves themselves produce fascinating textures, and the colour bleeds into the work to supply an ochre that I hadn’t seen earlier than.

My work is motivated by encountering or uncovering the surprising. It’s like residue, just like the ore that you just get out of the earth. And the purpose is the elegant. However it’s very laborious to search out and even outline. You is perhaps in search of it, however you possibly can’t anticipate finding it. You understand it whenever you see it. It needs to be obtrusive, but surprising. The spectacle will be so ugly—repugnant. It’s a profound, inarticulate feeling. It creates this sense of awe; awe made actual! Okwui Enwezor spoke a few deeply skeptical imaginative and prescient of the elegant in my work, and whereas what I’m saying may not sound skeptical, you will be skeptical in your reasoning—when issues are so unreal they should be touched. I believe that abstraction continues to be legitimate. It’s the foundation upon which my work turns. Abstraction passes all of the exams: It’s automated, it’s chancy, it’s dangerous. It’s primarily based on making an attempt to get the most effective from nothing.

— As advised to Camila McHugh