I’m a sensory seeker. I crave daring shade, immersive environments, and visuals whose impressions go away riotous phosphenes dancing throughout my eyelids. So, after all, once I visited Feeling Colour: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value, I anticipated a deal with.
It took just a little looking out to search out the doorway to the exhibition, nestled towards the again of the everlasting assortment galleries on the primary ground of the museum. A dreamy canvas by Frank Bowling, with chunky, gauzy, and poured paint textures in golden, rusty, and pastel hues, units the tone for the present, which locations Bowling’s and Aubrey Williams’ work in dialog with each other. Two artists are deeply linked — each from Guyana, each working in London within the late twentieth century, and each investigating supplies, abstraction, and sociopolitical realities by their very own lenses.
Set up view of “Fred’stouch” by Frank Bowling in “Feeling Colour” on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
Ghostly renderings lure me towards two of Frank Bowling’s work. I see the continent of South America, the nation of Guyana, and colonial buildings, floating amid stable bars of purple, yellow, black, and inexperienced mimicking the Guyanese and Pan-African flags. Bowling’s experimentation with symbolism, materials, and software creates a way of conflicted motion between house and tradition.
It’s a smallish present, dense and vibrant. I discover myself looping round and round, revisiting the work like a pollinator, in search of connections and divergences. The exhibition structure teams Bowling’s and Williams’ work in alternating galleries, sustaining aesthetic and conceptual separations between the artists and their work. Whereas a said objective of the present was to put the artists in dialog with each other, I’d characterize their interactions as a sequence of alternating monologues.
Set up view of “Feeling Colour” on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
Aubrey Williams’ geometric and figurative explorations of Indigenous South American and Pre-Columbian cultures fill the most important house, incorporating parts of nature and spirituality by shade and abstraction. I disappear into the radiant worlds.
Set up view of “Feeling Colour” on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
My eyes cross making an attempt to maintain the compositions from whirling off the canvases as circles flip to suns flip to feathers flip to eyes flip to flowers flip to gears and mysterious mechanisms. I drool over thick functions of paint over gossamer veils of shade, creating a fragile batik-like dyed floor that pushes far, distant. Williams creates the push and pull of house, time, and tradition as he manipulates the paint. These work are alive.
Aubrey Williams, “Moon Signal V (Olmec-Maya and Now” (element), 1984, oil on canvas
Aubrey Williams, “Moon Signal V (Olmec-Maya and Now” (element), 1984, oil on canvas
A couple of of Bowling’s massive shade subject abstractions beg to be touched. For Zephyr radiates in opposition to its blue wall, the place bands of sentimental, sheer shade go away me transfixed. I, weirdly, salivate. I wish to slice this portray up and eat it as a candy, bitter deal with. Bowling’s cautious software creates mini ecosystems by pouring, brushing, scraping, layering, and lifting. The paint speaks of change, managed and unintended.
Frank Bowling, “For Zephyr,” on view on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
Work from Aubrey Williams’ Shostakovich sequence visualize the ability of music. Having grown up in a musical family, with a classical violinist mother, I’d been wanting ahead to seeing these work. I’d hoped for put in audio system to play choices of music, in order that the sound and visuals may come collectively extra seamlessly. Nonetheless, I used to be at the least happy that the wall label for Symphony No. 11, opus 103 (Shostakovich) featured a QR code to take heed to a efficiency of the titular composition.. Wishing for a bench, I stood listening on my cellphone and permitting my eyes to traverse the corresponding portray, following the otherworldly strings, the pounding of the timpani, the triumphant brass, the chic thriller of the rests. Within the portray as within the music, there’s curiosity, battle, victory, and the unknown.
Aubrey Williams, “Symphony No. 11, opus 103 (Shostakovich),” on view on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
As a last shock, I encounter an interactive house. In an uncommon transfer for the Trendy, I discover a desk with books and catalogues, a documentary movie, and… a immediate for customer engagement! As a museum educator who values play, interactivity, and alternatives for collective reflection, I used to be excited to learn by layer upon layer of messages from earlier guests and contribute my very own. The partitions are stuffed with slips of paper that includes phrases and drawings addressing (or pointedly avoiding) the immediate:
Decide a shade.
Any shade.
Really feel a Colour.
Let it exist past sight.
Think about its weight, its texture, its motion.
Draw how that shade feels, what it does, not what it seems like.
Use your phrases or draw the sensation.
Set up view of an interactive house inside “Feeling Colour” on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
Set up view of an interactive house inside “Feeling Colour” on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value
As I go away, sensorially sated, I ponder. What half does shade actually play in my world, past the museum, past the studio? What tales, reminiscences, or new concepts do I discover embedded within the pigments, sounds, and environments of my life? Of many conclusions, one sticks with me: that shade in my life is punctuation. Its presence, absence, hue, and saturation affect the tenor of my day-to-day actions and tint my reminiscences. A juicy pink is a sliced watermelon, the sweet scent of Bullfrog sunscreen, and my Granny’s crackling cackle. A gaudy orange and teal costume is confidence and energy. Recollections of an extended since useless liked one are a misty white gray, rising in opacity yr over yr. Exclamation factors. Query marks. Ellipses.
Feeling Colour: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling is on view on the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value by July 27, 2025.
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