David Bowes Biography
David Bowes was born in Boston in 1957.
In 1983, Annina Nosei, the courageous and daring gallery owner who had organized Jean-Michel Basquiat's first solo exhibition in 1981, arrived in New York at the studio of the young Bostonian artist. The gallery owner is fascinated by the Italian air that emanates from David's large gouaches. Asking him how long he stayed in Italy, the young man replies that he has never seen her. Immediately, Annina Nosei organizes a trip that the boy had long dreamed of: five months in Rome of wonderful life, meetings, work, exhibitions and visits to the most beautiful places in the city, which will give structure to the creative framework that was progressively taking shape.
He has exhibited in major galleries and public spaces both in Europe and the United States. He is a great lover of Italy, where he often comes and where he has participated in exhibitions such as Terrae Motus, invited in 1986 by Lucio Amelio, and at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Bowes is a painter-traveller, passionate about the East and history of art, of which he is a great connoisseur. With his great visionary power, he creates paintings that represent serene idylls, inspired by the suggestions of Tiepolo and the Pompeian grotesques, which offer man a pleasant place to live. His style fuses elements of Baroque and new Romanticism, Surrealism and meticulous pseudo-graffiti, as noted by the critic Alan Jones (2016). His paintings can be spacious and airy, but even when they depict landscapes with distant castles and mountains, there is always the suggestion of a stage and background that could easily be brought closer.
His figures have a theatrical air, especially those with the appearance of Pierrot and Colombine and other characters from the Commedia dell'Arte. Bowes practices what might be called hieroglyphic figuration and with a few strokes of a heavy brush can indicate an elaborately dressed figure or the sinuous gestures of a tropical vine. Of course, some renderings are more hieroglyphic than others. The larger the form, the more fully Bowes employs the familiar devices of figure painting.
Today, he lives and works in Newton, Massachusetts.
