Margaret Bowland, until April 1, Babcock Galleries, New York

Margaret Bowland's first New York solo exhibition "Excerpts from the Great American Songbook" is currently on at Babcock Galleries. This is definitely an exhibition not to miss as Margaret Bowland is one of the great up & coming painters currently working in the USA.

Margaret Bowland: Excerpts from the Great American Songbook is accompanied by a new book on the artist written by Siri Hustvedt and published jointly by Babcock Galleries and the Greenville County Museum of Art.

After New York, the exhibition goes to the Greenville County Museum of Art from May 18 to July 17, 2011.

Margaret Bowland's Excerpts from the Great American Songbook explores problematic and provocative issues of race, gender, beauty and individuality in contemporary social thought. She evokes great old musical standards like "Isn't It Romantic," with its velvet melody caressing one's ear and lyrics hanging in the air: "Soon I will have found some girl that I adore/Isn't it romantic?/While I sit around my love can scrub the floor..." Suddenly, it isn't so romantic as the song floats one into the dark side of gender and race. Bowland says "beauty makes sense to me...has weight for me, only when it falls from grace. It starts to matter when it carries damage. Sorrow allows [beauty] to cast a shadow". And what is the shadowy dark side of beauty? Bowland's paintings, conceived with a rich tenebrist light seem to punch their way into one's consciousness through the captivating metaphorical image of a young black girl whose inner awareness looks upon an outer world in which "it ain't necessarily so". Everything is so audaciously familiar in Margaret Bowland's paintings, so known and certain, and yet immediately, viscerally and fastidiously uncertain.

AND THE COTTON IS HIGH, 2011, 82 x 70 inches, Oil on linen

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, 2010, 65 3/4 x 56 1/4 inches, Oil on canvas

SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL COME, 2010, 78 x 64 inches, Oil on linen

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW, 2011, 82 x 66 inches, Oil on linen

Margaret Bowland, A Pop-Up Project, 12th of May, Washington, DC

A pop-up project is a series of innovative, curated art exhibitions and events that “pop-up” at various locations throughout Washington, DC. The "a pop-up project's" is curated by local curator and artist advocate Amy Morton of MFA Morton Fine Art.

For its inaugural exhibition a pop-up project will open I Dream Awake from March 26 to May 28, 2010 in the former Numark Gallery space located in Penn Quarter at 625-627 E St NW, Washington, DC 20004.

Exhibiting a variety of media, I Dream Awake explores original artistic expressions of awakened realities and unconscious dreams. Exhibition includes New York artists, Mikel Glass, Kenichi Hoshine and Margaret Bowland; Los Angeles artists Vonn Sumner and Susan Burnstine; and local artists Rosemary Feit Covey, Laurel Hausler, Lizzie Newton and Tim Tate.



Flower Girl, oil on linen, 52 x 44 inches


Artist talk with Margaret Bowland - this Wednesday 5/12, 6pm at 625 E St NW.

For more information Click Here

Location Click Here



Another Thorny Crown, charcoal & pastel on rag paper, 60 x 48 inches



Murakami Wedding No 2, oil on linen, 78 x 66 inches



Another Thorny Crown III, charcoal & pastel on paper, 67 x 49 inches


Sydney art dealer & writer Michael Reid has written an interesting article for The Art Market Monitor where he talks about trends in artist & gallery relationships, including the proliferation of pop-up, short term, art exhibitions in unorthodox spots.

Letter from Australia
by Michael Reid
A Matrix of Exhibition Behaviours

To read the article click here