After moving to New York in 1966, Frank Bowling became familiar with the work of American abstract painters. Increasingly invested in formal issues, by the early 1970s he had abandoned the semi-figurative imagery of his Map Paintings to fully embrace the chromatic potential of abstraction. Bowling’s Poured Paintings (1973—78), which feature brightly colored spills of acrylic paint, positioned him at the forefront of post-painterly abstraction. Building a mechanical device—a tilting platform—that allowed him to pour acrylic from heights of up to two meters, he created works that celebrated the materiality of paint while forwarding an impression of gestural immediacy. As the critic and writer Mel Gooding observes, “In effect the painting made itself with a minimum of assistance from the painter. In their thrilling unpredictability … these poured paintings have about them something very close to the free-form excitement of contemporaneous New York jazz.”
