The possibilities of paint

‘The possibilities of paint,’ Frank Bowling has observed, ‘are endless.’ The superb career retrospective of his work at Tate Britain demonstrates as no words could that he is correct, and that the obituaries of this perennial medium — so often declared moribund or defunct — are completely wrong. This presents more than half a century’s virtuoso exploration of what pigment on canvas can achieve.

After his first decade of work, Bowling (born 1934) became what is called an abstract artist. But that is a vague and unsatisfactory category. His early, figurative pictures such as ‘Cover Girl’ (1966) could be labelled ‘pop’. It features an image of a Japanese supermodel garnered from the front of the Observer colour supplement — plus a very different silkscreened photograph of a shop in New Amsterdam, Guyana, which was the artist’s childhood home.

In other respects, however, the picture — like all good ‘figurative’ paintings — is quite abstract, mixing sharply edged stripes and soft, cloud-like patches of colour. Later on, after he had ostensibly crossed the frontier into abstraction, Bowling’s pictures still continued to be powerfully evocative of the physical world. ‘Towards Crab Island’ (1983) has the feel of a waterland by Monet. The Great Thames series from the late 1980s, painted in a Docklands studio, suggests the ooze and ripple of the river nearby.

The ten-foot high multi-hued waterfall of ‘Aston’s Plunge’ (2011) has something of the sublimity of a late Turner (though in a much funkier vein). Bowling is aware of his great predecessors. He has talked about the challenge of working in London, ‘Turner’s town’. A touch of Constable is visible too, side by side with Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.

Pairing the Bowling show with Van Gogh in Britain, downstairs at Tate Britain, is unexpectedly apt.