Denis Bowen was born near Kimberley, South Africa, to Welsh and English parents on 5 April 1921 Oprhaned at a young age, he arrived in England in 1926, subsequently training at Huddersfield School of Art (1938–39) and then, after serving as a naval operator in the Second World War, the Royal College of Art in London (1946–49). Bowen is best known for his contribution to postwar abstraction in Britain, setting up the London-based New Vision Group and its associated gallery in the mid-1950s, as well as teaching and exhibiting widely throughout his life.
Painter, gallery director and teacher Denis Bowen was born on 5 April 1921 at Zantespans Drift Farm, near Kimberley, South Africa, to parents of Welsh and English origin. Orphaned at a young age, Bowen, along with his brothers and sisters, moved to England in 1926 where he first lived with his grandmother and then later his aunt in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. He was schooled at King James I Grammar School in Almondbury, and in 1938 attended Huddersfield School of Art, where he benefited from the encouraging tutelage of painter Charles Reginald Napier. In 1939, Bowen’s art education was inevitably halted by the Second World War, in which he served as Chief Naval Radar Operator, travelling on Atlantic convoys to Canada, Africa and the Far East. These experiences provided much of the visual and iconographic inspiration that would later develop in his art, particularly found in the mercurial, oceanic, gestural liquid paintings that comprise much of his oeuvre. After the war, Bowen received a borough scholarship from Huddersfield to resume his studies, attending the Royal College of Art in London between 1946 and 1949, where he experimented with tone and gestural abstraction. He then married his first wife, 18-year-old art student Eve Elizabeth Reinhardt (although this was short-lived), and upon completing his qualification commenced a lifelong teaching career. He taught part-time in the interior design department at Kingston Institute of Art, followed by teaching for the intermediate course at Hammersmith School of Art during the early 1950s, the school of industrial design at the Central School of Art (1953–6) and then at the Royal College of Art (1956–61).
In addition to his teaching and artistic pursuits, Bowen established the New Vision Group (NVG) in 1951, which consisted of meetings and displays organised with his students. Through this group, he pioneered Tachism which, similar to abstract expressionism, used vigorous blocks of colour and free-form brushstrokes, influenced by a combination of the New York abstract expressionists and artists from the Arte Informale movement in France, including Henri Michaux, Jean Fautrier and Lucio Fontana. As a practicing artist who was a regular and avid attendee of exhibitions, Bowen came into contact with many other international figures he admired, including Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu and later Mark Rothko. These experiences and influences, as well as a growing knowledge of the gallery circuit, eventually led to his involvement in exhibition organising and critical writing. In 1955, Bowen worked with NVG members Halima Nalecz (herself, a Polish émigré) and Mauritius-born, Frank Avray Wilson to create a permanent exhibition space for the group, located at 4 Seymour Place, Marble Arch, where it remained until 1966. The New Vision Centre Gallery (NVCG), as it was called, combined the ethos of NVG with the Free Painters Group (later the Free Painters and Sculptors), a democratic forum of which Bowen was also a founding member. The NVCG had a significant role in shaping British art in the postwar period, particularly in its advocation of international artists and abstract art; exhibitors included Aubrey Williams, Judy Cassab and Peter Blake.
Alongside his career as a teacher and gallerist, Bowen’s artistic output remained prolific and was exhibited widely. In 1957 he participated in the landmark exhibition Metavisual, Tachist, Abstract at London's Redfern Gallery, alongside leading young abstract painters such as Gillian Ayres and Roger Hilton. In 1960, he exhibited with the Redfern twice more, as well as showing with Max Chapman, Anthony Underhill and Williams at the Grabowski Gallery (also founded by a Polish émigré, Mateusz Grabowski) in Continuum. In 1962 he married his second wife, the secondary school teacher Judith Anne Stapleton, although the marriage was brief and also ended in divorce. In 1963 he held a solo show at the Molton Gallery, established by German refugee gallerist, Annely Juda.
Having moved away from New Vision painting in 1966, between 1969 and 1980, Bowen’s art was increasingly inspired by space exploration and the space race, with much of his painterly works formalised by geometrical symbols, stellar or planetary discs, and later included psychedelic forms that incorporated the use of UV lights, music and live performance. In 1985, Bowen co-founded the Celtic Vision Group with painters John Bellamy and Derek Culley. Touring internationally between Madrid, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall between 1986–87, the group celebrated its artists’ Celtic roots. In his later years, Bowen dedicated more of his time to writing art criticism for Arts Review and, among other pursuits, travelling. Denis Bowen died from pneumonia in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London, England on 23 March 2006. His works are held in many UK public collections, including Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Towner, Eastbourne.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Denis Bowen]
Publications related to [Denis Bowen] in the Ben Uri Library