Provenance
The Artist, by whom gifted to Institute of Contemporary Arts for a charity raffle in 1958, where acquired by the family of the previous owner, and thence by descent.
Note: Denis Bowen was one of the most widely respected abstract painters of the post war period in London. Born in Kimberley, South Africa in 1921 he was brought up and educated in England, studying at Huddersfield School of Art and, following war service in the Navy, attended the Royal College of Art. Bowen then emerged as one of the chief proponents of the 'Tachiste' movement in Britain, developing the influences of European ‘art informel’ painters like Soulanges and Mathieu. He was committed to gestural informal painting and ‘mark making’ which exploited chance and accident as part of an imaginative manipulation of paint. His approach was connected with the idea of ‘action painting’ for which Jackson Pollock is famous.