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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
SIR FRANK BOWLING, OBE RA (1934 - ) Mother Approaching Sixty.
Color photo-etching, soft-ground and spite bite aquatint on paper, 2003. 882x774 mm; 34 3/4x30 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 10/40 in pencil, lower margin. Published by the Brodsky Center for Innovative Prints and Paper, Rutgers University, with collaborating Master Printer Randy Hemminghaus.
This print was commissioned as a benefit print for Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, which staged a retrospective of Bowling's work in 2003. Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Mother Approaching Sixty is Bowling's sole photographic and figurative portrait of his career. The neatly drawn circular trace overlaid on the portrait appears first in a 1983 painting entitled Sand Circle and again in a series begun in 2000, evoking the daybreak. In addition, a sharp line crossing the picture plane in Bowling's paintings conjures the horizon and, at once, the liminal zone where figure, ground, and viewer converge. Through photographic and printmaking processes, this close-up of the artist's mother, smiling at life's long sunset, is rendered through variation in tones and colors that emphasize her face as color, volume, and surface.
