David Bowes
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, États-Unis in 1957.
American · Contemporary figuration · Neo-Romanticism · Surrealism · East Village scene
An American painter associated with the emergence of New York’s East Village scene, David Bowes trained at the Rhode Island School of Design from the mid-1970s. His work gained recognition in the city’s art world early in the following decade, notably through exhibitions with Annina Nosei and Tony Shafrazi.
His paintings develop a visionary mode of figuration through intense colour and loose, sensitive brushwork. Allegory, mythology and art history overlap in images inhabited by figures, animals, flowers and arabesques. Tiepolo, Baroque painting, Neo-Romanticism and Surrealism are recurring points of reference, reinterpreted with the immediacy of contemporary visual culture.
Bowes’s engagement with the East Village artistic community, particularly his friendship with Keith Haring, accompanied the first phase of his career. Later periods spent in Rome, Naples, Florence and Palermo deepened his relationship with the Italian figurative tradition. In Naples he entered Lucio Amelio’s circle and contributed to Terrae Motus, a project now housed at the Royal Palace of Caserta.
His documented exhibition history includes the Sanoja project at the 48th Venice Biennale, Painting as a Radical Form at Collezione Maramotti and the Premio Lissone 20/21. At Lissone, an acquisition award brought the exhibited work into the permanent collection of the MAC – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea.
Bowes combines narrative, cultural memory and gestural freedom, transforming ancient archetypes into ironic and poetic apparitions. The autograph lithograph Prométhée and autograph gouache Adam & Ève, both dated 1985, belong naturally to this mythological strand within this corpus.
