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Denis Bowen

This early expressionist abstract drawing by Tachiste painter Denis Bowen was done in 1961 while he was still part of the New Vision Centre Gallery, which he founded with Avray Wilson and Halima Nalecz and which became the centre of avant-garde art from all over Europe from 1956 until its closure in 1966.

Denis Bowen (1921-2006) was born in Kimberley, South Africa, to a Welsh farmer. Orphaned at a young age, Bowen and his siblings moved to England in the mid-1920s, living with family in Manchester and then in Huddersfield. It was there that he enrolled on the Huddersfield Art School under the tutelage of Reginald Napier, who eventually encouraged him to apply to the Royal College of Art, London.

It wasn't until after his service in the Second World War that he attended college, in 1946. The pursuit of the new and exciting Tachism movement (a European equivalent to America's 'Abstract Expressionism') allowed the artist to break away from a more classical training he received under Carel Weight, Robert Buhler, and John Minton.

Denis Bowen leaned toward the experimental explorations of contemporaries such as Pierre Soulages and Georges Mathieu, and their knowledge of "pure painting," which translated well to the printmaking media that Bowen began to experiment with as he began teaching the early 1950s.

From the estate of Lilly Stern, owner of Molton Gallery in London in the 1960's.