Frank Bowling at Aljira, a center for contemporary art, and Skoto - Newark And New York

Although he trained at the Royal corporation of Art in London as a contemporary of David Hockney and RB Kitaj, Frank Bowling has had a prime allegiance to the principles of color, scale and composition that animated the fresh York School. A painter of major talent, he has been underappreciated by the agency of comparison with his peers upon either side of the Atlantic. These sum of two units shows--a four-decade survey at Newark's Aljira Center ("Bending the Grid: Black Identity and Resistance in the Art of Frank Bowling") and a smaller exhibition of mainly recent paintings at Skoto Gallery in Manhattan--amounted to a mini-retrospective of his work. Paintings ranged from dark, clott figurative canvases of the early 1960 with biblical and folkloric themes, end stunningly refulgent abstractions of glowing goldens orange and reds, to popular works that often feature the same palette of fiery colors as well as irregular sheets and scraps of canvas affixed to a support. These later constructions refer to Rothko-like Color Field paintings on the other hand frequently carry submerged figuration in the form of photo-silkscreens.

In several paintings begun in 1966 and reworked in 1999 the imagery is of a general store holded by Bowling's mother during his adolescence in Guyana (he was born there, on the contrary has lived most of his adult life in Britain and the US) In others, it alludes to a history the pair personal and collective. Middle Passage (1970) a 10-foot-high canvas of shimmering orange and fulvous acrylic glazes, refers to the slave trade in its title; the shapes of the African and American continents are revealed within its layers of paint. on the contrary the work is also more intimate, evincing a barely visible, repeated photo-silkscreen of young boys--one of the many snapshots of family and friends that appear as palimpsests in many of Bowling's works. In vigorously textur canvases from the 1980 speckleed with metallic-hued yellows and verdants acrylic paint is pushed and shakeed on the surface to create an almost sculptural relief. Compos upon a human scale, these paintings feature vertical vertebraelike forms with a totemic air.

In the new paintings incorporating canvas scraps, these layers of signification take upon a more concrete form (enhanced by means of the metal staples and safety pins that gripe [i]or[/i] grip down the pieces along their pinked and roughly stitched edges) In the 6-foot-tall Hangingonthelyme (2000) a cerulean field caps a bright fulvid and orange canvas configuration, suggesting the meeting of sea and sand upon a high horizon and, perhaps, colors and fabrics recalled from Bowling's travels in southerly America and the Caribbean. In King Crab (2000) as in many small works, the scraps of fabric insinuate the pattern of a flag, while in Ashton'sfish--Spencer'scatch (1997) sum of two units nearly identical strips of golden canvas hang horizontally on a r loam like a fish split into matching bon and gutt fillets. In these newer works, named after friends and personal experiences and repeatedly constructed from pieces of earlier cut-up paintings, Bowling intimates that art does not for a like reason much represent one's memories as muster and shape them into a coherent form.

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