Sam Cornish – författare

Frank Bowling (b.1934, Bartica, Guyana) is attracting ever-growing international recognition as an abstract painter. This is the first publication to examine Bowling’s art and ideas in relation to sculpture. Lavishly illustrated, it features an extended essay by curator Sam Cornish charting Bowling’s interactions with sculpture since the 1960s. The book asks how seeing Bowling’s sculpture, and thinking about sculpture more broadly, may extend our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship also highlights the importance of sculpture to High Modernism, from within which Bowling’s mature art emerged. Also included are an in-conversation between Allie Biswas and sculptor Thomas J. Price, and a poem dedicated to Bowling by sculptor and author Barbara Chase-Riboud.

In 1994 painter John Hoyland made an unruly group of ceramic sculptures. Loaded with colour, humour and creatureliness, he dubbed them ‘these mad little hybrids’. They now appear remarkably contemporary, in sync with a broad range of recent and current sculpture. These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture presents the ceramics in dialogue with sculpture by Caroline Achaintre, Eric Bainbridge, Phyllida Barlow, Olivia Bax, Hew Locke, Anna Reading, Jessi Reaves, Andrew Sabin, John Summers and Chiffon Thomas.Essays by co-curators Olivia Bax and Sam Cornish situate the ceramics within contemporary sculptural discourse and in relation to Hoyland’s deep personal engagement with sculpture. How and why could a sculpture be funny? How did sculpture help an abstract painter rethink his relationship with the High Modernist tradition and find a new relationship with the wider world? James Fisher considers hybridity in the guise of an imaginary dialogue with King Kong, while Hannah Hughes’s visual essay explores the Polaroid photographs that Hoyland employed to help move his dramatic and powerful imagery between two and three dimensions.Published in association with Slimvolume.