Looking West Again

With Looking West Again, Frank Bowling investigates space and place through the lenses of subjectivity, memory, and fantasy. Chromatically riotous rivulets, islands, and peninsulas of pigment skip across a translucent ground of vertical color bands, from orange to pink, purple, cerulean, green, and yellow. At center, the circular imprint of a bucket lifted off the wet canvas elicits a fountain of paint that cascades to the bottom of the composition, akin to Edvard Munch’s depictions of the sun as a continuum of color tethered to the horizon. Bowling revisits his past painterly techniques, including the hazy washes of his late 1950s figurative works, the cartographic composition of his 1960s map paintings, the frozen flows of his 1970s poured paintings, and the gel-encrusted studio detritus of his materially rich 1980s tableaux. With this work, however, he broaches new conceptual terrain. For Bowling, the West is not only a geographic location but also a cultural construction upon which the desires of colonizers and contemporaries are projected.