Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling: Feeling Color

Platform
Continuing the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s commitment to collecting and exhibiting international art from the 1940s to today, the Museum is excited to launch Platform—a new exhibition initiative showing how artists and art histories from across the globe are connected. Illustrating a robust perspective on modern and contemporary art, Platform encompasses a series of artists whose works expand on the Modern’s international mission. Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling is the inaugural presentation, Platform 1, which showcases two integral artists within the canon of twentieth-century abstraction. The Platform series aims to create dynamic dialogues that embody the universal qualities and intersectionality of art, spanning geographic and national boundaries.

Exhibition
Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, organized by the Modern and Curator María Elena Ortiz, celebrates the work of these two artists and their contributions to the story of abstract painting in the late twentieth century. Williams (1926–90) and Bowling (b. 1934) migrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America to European and American cities in the 1950s, escaping social upheavals in their native country. Expanding on the international legacies of abstraction that are among the Modern’s central concerns, these artists’ works demonstrate that, even in moments of despair, art creates a space for refuge, reckoning, and imagination. This exhibition puts both artists in conversation, illustrating Williams’s powerful commitment to investigating abstract forms and Bowling’s painterly and experimental approach. Together their works provide an opportunity to reflect on the power of art and abstraction in the twentieth century. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, including a curatorial essay by Ortiz and color plate illustrations.

Feeling Color presents works from Williams’s expansive series “Shostakovich,” 1980–81, and “The Olmec-Maya and Now,” 1982–88, as well as other works on canvas and paper. In dialogue with Williams’s works are paintings from Bowling’s influential Map Paintings series, 1967–71, and his later Poured Paintings, 1973–78, which evidence his socio-political concerns and explore the materiality of paint.

These works reflect the artists’ histories by combining modernist abstraction with, in Bowling’s case, imagery derived from African diasporic dwellings and, in Williams’s case, the Indigenous cultures of South America, each pointing to the complexity of their postcolonial heritage. These are works that embrace color, movement, experimentation, and abstraction to convey human emotion.

About the artists
Aubrey Williams, an artistic prodigy from youth, travelled to the UK from Guyana in 1952. He toured Britain and Europe extensively in order to closely investigate art and artists he had long admired. Williams’s excitement for the Abstract Expressionist movement peaked at seeing work by artists such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Wifredo Lam, and Jackson Pollock. On settling in London, Williams enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art prior to exhibiting and gaining notoriety at the renowned Archer and New Vision Centre galleries in London, later working from studios he established in Jamaica and Florida. Williams was a founding member of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement and was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Painting in 1965. An important figure in British postwar painting, with works held in major global institutions and collections, Williams demonstrates a unique approach to abstraction, frequently incorporating elements of figuration. His visionary, forward thinking regarding global ecology and technological progression remains of utmost relevance today.

Frank Bowling, OBE, RA was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America and migrated to London in 1953 to study art. Eventually he moved to New York City, keeping studios in both cities. In New York, he cultivated a community that included critic Clement Greenberg and like-minded artists such as Jack Whitten and Al Loving Jr. Bowling was elected to Britain’s Royal Academy in 2005 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. He is a pivotal figure in British abstract painting, contributing to the canon for over six decades. His work has been exhibited widely and is part of prestigious collections around the world.

Programs

Exhibition Film
The Mark of the Hand: Aubrey Williams
March 27, 6pm

Exhibition Lecture
Dr. Eddie Chambers
Professor of Art History, African Diaspora Art, University of Texas at Austin
The Delayed Presence of Bowling, Williams, et al.
April 11, 6pm

Exhibition Gallery Performances
April 4, TCU Graduate Student Ensemble, 6pm
Additional dates to be announced.