40 Years of the Future: Jo McGonigal x Frank Bowling

Housed in Castlefield Gallery’s distinct architect-designed interior, this dynamic exhibition will bring together site-specific ‘spatial paintings’ by Jo McGonigal with paintings and sculptures by Sir Frank Bowling.

Each artist’s practice has a highly imaginative and unconventional engagement with pictorial and physical space. As an exhibition 40 Years of the Future: Jo McGonigal x Frank Bowling will explore new ways of thinking about the relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture. 

In his book Frank Bowling: Sculpture (2022), writer and curator Sam Cornish shares a story of Bowling receiving an invitation from Castlefield Gallery in the 1980s to exhibit his paintings alongside the work of a contemporary sculptor. As a response, Bowling provided the sculptures himself. This led to a solo exhibition of Bowling’s paintings, works on paper and sculpture at the gallery in 1988. Bowling made a series of welded steel sculptures largely put together from the by-products of an engineering firm next to his studio. Like his paintings, the sculptures have multiple influences, playfully mixing references from high modernism, classical African sculpture, cubism and Russian constructivism. Except for a tour of this work at the time, the public has rarely had access to Bowling’s sculptures since.