?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
FRANK BOWLING (1936 - ) Karters Choice.
Acrylic and spray paint on cotton canvas, 1972. 2515x1600 mm; 99x63 inches. Signed, dated "Spring-Summer 1972" and inscribed "First Owner Janice Karter Sept. 1972" in ink, verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, Janice Karter (1972); private collection.
This monumental Frank Bowling painting is a significant work from his important map paintings, and possibly one of the last major works from the series. Bowling painted this in New York after his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which ran from November 4 - December 6, 1971. He began using continental shapes as early as 1967 upon his arrival in New York, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. Bowling joined Melvin Edwards, Frank Eversly, Al Loving and Alma Thomas as artists who received solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in their Contemporary Black Arts in America series through the 1970s.
In his series of paintings, Bowling uses stencil outlines of the continents as both abstract devices and signifiers of the growing internationalism of abstract art. Like his world map Polish Rebecca, 1971, Bowling projects Australia's silhouette in a sea of purple passages of both staining and lush brushwork. Bowling's continents cross horizontal or vertical bands of color that evoke both lines of longitude or latitude, and the stripe paintings of the period--his 1968 painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman makes this association clear.Bowling, however, let these markers drift in the idiom of abstaction without an overt political reading.
Bowling makes his painterly intentions for his map paintings known in a talk with Whitney curator Robert Doty: "After leaving London to live in New York, I broke loose and began to get much more involved in pure painting, trying to fuse the kinds of things I was interested in with what could actually be upheld viably in a painting situation. I eventually found that the most comfortable way of actually dealing with paint and structures from the outside was by leaning on ready-made shapes and photographs. The gradual turnover of rejecting what was too complicated led me to remove much of it entirely into another medium." In Looking at Barney and Mark and other works from 1972, the continents had vanished--Bowling's abstractions were left to show its stripes. Gooding pp. 66-69.
