 – As part of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s commitment to collecting and exhibiting international art from the 1940s to today, this new exhibition…){kind=link}
FORT WORTH, TX (PNAN) – As part of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s commitment to collecting and exhibiting international art from the 1940s to today, this new exhibition initiative, “Platform” showcases how artists and art histories from across the globe are connected.
Opening Saturday, March 15, 2025 “Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling” is the inaugural presentation, which illustrate these two integral artists that embody the universal qualities and intersectionality of art, spanning geographic and national boundaries, 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. 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.
‘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.
For complete programming, call 817.738.9215 or online www.modern.org