Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling

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.