Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip…Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973-1978

A year-long display of Frank Bowling’s pioneering abstract paintings. In these innovative works, Bowling developed a technique of pouring paint onto canvases that were angled using pegs to tilt at varying degrees. The artist controlled the speed that the paint ran over the canvas with startling and spontaneous results. These paintings also marked a new direction in Bowling's career; away from figurative works, his map paintings, and colour-field works, to something entirely new.

Accompanying the Tate Britain display is a five minute loop showing excerpts from a film on Frank Bowling’s career 'Painting for Britain', directed by Rose Jones

“The poured paintings are, perhaps, Bowling's most innovative series of works, showing his skill for experimentation and painterly nuance as an outgrowth of late twentieth-century abstraction.”
Courtney J. Martin, Display Curator, Tate Britain