An exhibition uniting work by Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA and his friend of over 40 years, Dennis de Caires, looking at flowers and nature across their practices.
Frank Bowling has created six new works specially for this exhibition, responding to the Garden Museum’s medieval church architecture and stained-glass windows. Revisiting his 1980s Cathedral Paintings series at a larger scale, the new works will be displayed within the arches of the museum’s central Nave, incorporating fabric and found materials embedded structurally into towering canvases.
Bowling developed this new body of work after passing the Garden Museum every day while travelling to his studio in Peacock Yard, Elephant and Castle. Alongside this series, the exhibition will feature a selection of Bowling’s abstract flower paintings, and archival photographs and material relating to his childhood in Guyana.
Like Bowling, Dennis de Caires’ work is shaped by an engagement with Guyana, memory and artistic exchange, though each artist’s approach to material and form remains distinct. Recent paintings by de Caires explore the blurring of interior and exterior living in the Caribbean compared to the UK. In imagined still lifes set within interior scenes, the natural forms of flowers and fruit are set against geometric patterns, stencilled forms, and complex colour and spatial relationships.
Both artists were born in Guyana and attended the Royal College of Art in London. They met in 1982 when Bowling was invited to teach at Winchester School of Art, where de Caires was a student. This will be their third exhibition together, following shows in Guyana in 1989 and Wales in 2012, bringing together new and recent paintings alongside works borrowed from their 1989 show.
