Frank Bowling, Sasha’s Green Bag, 1988

The exhibition will continue 40 years of the gallery working with artists to ask what it is to make and experience the art of our time.   

A couple of years after opening in 1984, Castlefield Gallery invited Bowling (who was then as now primarily known as a painter) to exhibit his work alongside a contemporary sculptor. A straightforward proposition for one artist to make work for the walls and the other to use the floor space. However, around this time Bowling had produced a series of welded steel sculptures and so he responded to the invitation by saying that he could also provide the sculptures for the exhibition himself, which led to a solo exhibition in 1988. These sculptures which are returning to the gallery this year have in the intervening years rarely been seen by the public. In his book Frank Bowling: Sculpture (2022), writer and curator Sam Cornish explores the importance of these works which were made at a pivotal time when Bowling was reconsidering how he was communicating imagery, content, and materiality in his painting. This exhibition and Cornish’s book argue that these works offer unique insights into Bowling’s paintings and the inspiration he draws from sculpture.   

In 2015, Castlefield Gallery showed Real Painting (co-curated by McGonigal and Deb Covell) a group exhibition which aimed to shift the focus from asking what a painting means to what it does. McGonigal believes that paintings should activate the body as much as the eye. Her works leave the constraints of the canvas behind, to interact directly with their environment. This autumn McGonigal will be applying layers of gesso, normally used to prime canvases, directly onto the gallery walls, before introducing lines of coloured chalk, piles of pigment, geometric structures, textile and archaeological elements. By combining these components together into 3D compositions McGonigal encourages visual but also other kinds of sensory engagement with the tactile, spatial, durational, and imaginative capacities of painting. 

Speaking about the upcoming exhibition Bowling has said: ‘Returning to Castlefield Gallery after all these years feels like revisiting an old conversation with new words. My sculptures and paintings are both a reflection and continuation of the ideas I’ve explored for decades around geometry and form. Having first exhibited here in 1988, it’s invigorating to now present my work alongside Jo’s spatial paintings, which will offer a fresh perspective to both our practices.’   

Sir Frank Bowling (2020) Photo by Sacha Bowling courtesy the artist

In Castlefield Gallery’s archive there is a paper copy of a text by Bowling titled: Formalist Art and the Black Experience. It appears to have been hand typed, likely copied out to accompany his exhibition in 1988, and contains an extract from an earlier 1970’s article by Bowling. There is a sense of frustration in this thoughtful and philosophical text that would resonate with many people today. Artists, curators, trustees of institutions and funding bodies continue to try to navigate together the sometimes politically fraught territory around which artists, and artworks get supported and exhibited. Agendas can also diverge when it comes to determining what is most relevant about these artworks and artists and how to communicate this to audiences, particularly in relation to artists with lived experience of marginalisation. Bowling’s essay is critical of too much emphasis being put on art which in a literal way attempts to represent or define the lived experience of different people. He suggests we should have greater consideration for the possibilities of more formalist art for conveying experience. Five decades later this exhibition acknowledges the importance of art that emphasises the material nuances of how it is made, how it feels and looks when you are physically present with it rather than focusing on its literal content.   

McGonigal like Bowling is fascinated by how it feels to be in front of or with a painting, speaking about the forthcoming exhibition she has said: ‘I am interested to see how the dense physicality of Frank’s paintings, how they are built, his attention to edges and boundaries through techniques such as marouflage, will interplay with my own concerns of deep materialities, figure-ground relationships and painting’s spatiality’. McGonigal’s works emphasise the materiality of their parts. They bring our attention to the subtle texture of gesso made from animal glue and marble dust. The raw presentation of other elements such as stone, chalk, pigment and metal, evoke their origins in the natural world. Gesso is traditionally used to create a surface or ground onto which a painting is made. McGonigal links this idea of gesso as the subterranean layer of painting to natural landscapes with their layers of sediment and material deposits. The resulting works both expose and revel in the physicality of painting and its use of materials produced over long periods of geological time.  

Jo McGonigal

In our present time following recent riots and protests, we might forget that to be truly progressive we must do more than take sides, ultimately, we have to find ways to bring people together, to overcome fears of otherness wherever we find it. Perhaps in that context this exhibition is a timely opportunity to be in the presence of artworks that resist easy categorisation which may feel both familiar and unfamiliar in places, partially understandable but not fully resolvable, connected to our bodies yet far beyond us. Primarily though this is an exhibition about painting, how it might interact with different disciplines such as sculpture and architecture as well as its own and other histories in order to consider what it might be to make and experience painting today.  

Matthew Pendergast Curator and Deputy Director Castlefield Gallery.  

40 Years of the Future: Jo McGonigal x Frank Bowling runs until 2 February 2025