Frank Bowling

Gift for my daughter who lived it.

You need to have seen the exhibition to fully appreciate this exceptional artist

Great reproduction of the current exhibition at the Tate.

I really like this artists work

Good value

The Tate book to accompany the Frank Bowling exhibition on at the Tate Britain in late 2019, it is a very fair companion to the show itself. As art books go it is really a 5-star book, however it really can't come close to the actual exhibition because Bowling's work is on such a large scale, with huge luminous canvases often embedded with other objects that add considerable amounts of texture and almost a sense of landscape. Some paintings look a bit as though they were lifted from a city street along with all the accumulated detritus of city living.Visiting a show at any of the Tates can be quite an undertaking, though. There's only so much time to take things in (staff have lives of their own, so I hear), and after an hour or two even a favourite artist's work tends to become heavy going - try going around Blake (on at the time of writing) without feeling that your senses are being assaulted by the time you reach the closing sections of the exhibition. Most exhibitions are quite an intense experience - I wouldn't have it any other way - but this makes the exhibition catalogue that much more important.Bowling's art needs to be "experienced" first hand to get a sense of what he was actually doing, and being close to the canvas is a big part of that. The details of his life and family beginnings are mentioned in the show to give context to the main feature, the painting themselves. This catalogue uses the art as a reminder of what you experienced first-hand, but the background is brought further forward allowing us to make more sense of the artist and his work as a whole, and this catalogue is a particularly good example of melding the art and the artist after the fact. It won't ever replace the sense of being in the presence of large artworks, but it will provide a good souvenir that happens to be educational and another insight into art practice, as all exhibition catalogues are.As an Art History graduate I find all of these catalogues interesting for layering on new aspects of art practice and how artists respond to society and life, there is always something usefully learned from each one from all the contextual "background" information. The fact that they are lavishly and accurately colourfully produced is a fantastic bonus.It might be a tie-in to a specific show, but it's a perspective on Frank Bowling's art and art practice that works in any context.

lots of photos and good commentary

A beautifully-produced book about a great artist who is not as well-known as he should be. The artist was born in Guyana and studied in England. He also worked in New York. His work is abstract and noted for its gorgeous colors. The book is the catalogue of the Tate Britain retrospective exhibition in London in 2019. Seven fine articles by experts are included, along with a chronology of his life and photos of the artist. The chief attraction, however, are the excellent reproductions of many of his paintings, 100 pages in full color, with many details, too. This should help to increase his international reputation, as he deserves. Highly recommended.

To start, the art of Frank Bowlng is, for me, amazing - his work is colorful, gritty, mysterious, and accessible all at the same time. I love it. But the book does a piss-poor job of representing such a fine artist.First, the text is miniscule, amost unreadable, and is presented in long 20-25 line paragraphs, that make it even harder to read! Add to this is the fact that on the text pages the margins are as wider as the text itself, which means we're left with a lot of unreadable text surrounded by a lot unncessary white space!Even with some of the images, they have left 1-2 inch margins, whereas it would have been much better if they had reduced the margins and made the images larger so we could see and explore them much more easily.I don't really understand why a book about such a fine artist is so poorly laid out! If the Tate had much better use of the book's white space, they could have made the text larger, broken up the too-long paragraphs and actually made the book readable. And they could have made many more of the images much more accessable!However, it's as if the Tate didn't really care about the art or the artist and was instead more interested in making the book be cool, modern and hip. That's the only excuse I can come up with, and it is indeed a poor one at that!

Dusty cover with gooey stains had to wipe off. Inner leaf corner is marked! Not Cool.Poor condition.