Frank Bowling: The Mother’s House Paintings

How can a house reflect migration’s arcs, its losses and gains? It is this quest for reconciliation that draws curator and scholar Grace Aneiza Ali into the “mother’s house paintings” by Guyanese-born British artist Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA (b. British Guiana, 1934). These early paintings in the artist’s oeuvre became informally regarded as the Mother’s House Paintings (1966 to 1971) as they are characterised by a singular architectural motif: a 1953 photograph of the house in which he grew up and often returned to with his family – his mother’s house (Mrs Agatha Elizabeth Bowling) – in New Amsterdam, Guyana. Notably, the black-and-white photograph itself of the three-storey clapboard colonial house was taken in 1953, Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II and the year Bowling, at nineteen years old, left the then colony of British Guiana for London. Throughout the series of paintings, Bowling’s varied artistic treatments renders the house as central, as silhouetted, as ghostly, as background, as foreground, as faint, as volatile, as looming, as inescapable, as fragile, as formidable. In this talk, Ali will expand on her research of these paintings, trace their scholarly and curatorial visibility, and offer the ways in which they speak to the grieved and ungrieved losses of migration.

As part of the lecture, Ben Bowling, Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at King's College London and son of Sir Frank Bowling will join Ali in conversation.

Image credit: Installation view, Un|Fixed Homeland, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, 2016, curated by Grace Aneiza Ali. Clockwise from left: Frank Bowling, Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog. 1966. Acrylic and silk-screened ink on canvas. Courtesy of the artist; Bowling’s Variety Store, Main Street, New Amsterdam, British Guiana, 1953. Used with permission from the Frank Bowling Archive. Photo: Argenis Apolinario