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.