EXXIBITION // FRANK BOWLING // COLLAGE // GALERIE HAUSER & WIRTH // PARIS

© Galerie Hauser & Wirth - Frank Bowling - Paris

Frank Bowling - Collage -  from 22 march to 24 may 2025

Galerie Hauser & Wirth
26 bis rue François 1er
75008 Paris

https://www.hauserwirth.com

‘Frank Bowling. Collage,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition in France, explores collage as a conceptual tool and technique for Bowling’s practice and thinking. The exhibition features works from the early 2000s up until the present day, where at the age of 91 Bowling still paints on a daily basis.

The starting point for the show is reflected in four new large-scale paintings on display in the ground floor gallery, which are comprised of multiple canvas panels. These monumental works—including the 4.4 meter-tall ‘Skid’ (2023)—are a renewal of Bowling’s use of collaged canvas and marouflage, which has long formed an important part of his practice.

Bowling’s attraction to collage was partly influenced by Henri Matisse’s cut-outs, which he first encountered in the late 1950s and again at the 1992 MoMA retrospective in New York. For an article in the 1999 Winter issue of ‘Modern Painters,’ Bowling was asked to reflect on his career and select a work of art that most shaped or changed his own vision and chose ‘The Snail’ (1953) by Matisse. Paying homage to this work, Bowling has made several collaged pieces directly referencing the spiral pattern, including ‘Back to Snail’ (2000).


The works selected for this exhibition also evidence the development in Bowling’s incorporation of found objects. Since the 1980s, diverse materials have found their way into his paintings, from children’s toys to medical equipment. In ‘Skid,’ for example, there are pieces cut from a medical plastic bag, a protruding medical tube, loose canvas string and strips of canvas.

These everyday objects provide the viewer with an entry point and most have some personal meaning to Bowling, acting as a form of autobiography. These items are embedded into the picture plane along with the translucent fluidity of acrylic gel and paint, breaking and erupting from the surface. ‘I’m moved to chuck in detritus, and watch it swim and settle,’ Bowling once said, ‘it makes me feel I can get to a whole vision of what I’ve passed through in life.’