David Dirrane Bowes was born in Boston in 1957. He attended Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the mid 1970s. He lived and worked between Newton and New York, where he was in close contact with the most famous artists of the 1980s, including Jean Michel Basquiat, George Condo and Keith Haring. As a lover of Italy and Renaissance and Baroque figurative painting, he carried out his activity between Rome, Naples, Florence and Palermo, before finally settling in Turin. It’s in these cities that he had the opportunity to meet artists such as Luigi Ontani, Nicola De Maria, Salvo, Mario Schifano and Emilio Prini, influential figures for his education.

He is a painter-traveller in love with the East and the history of art, of which he is an expert.

From his young age Bowes was influenced by Italian figurative painting and his training led him to take autonomous steps, totally independent of the art movements and trends of the time. Bowes, in fact, despite having frequented the most important artists of his time, was able to maintain an original vocabulary, free of ideological conditioning.

His paintings are often brightly colored, with loose painterly strokes and make reference to allegories, mythology and art history, in harmony between suggestions of Tiepolo and Pompeian grotesques, Baroque and Neo-Romanticism, Surrealism and Street Art.

The apparent idiosyncrasy of themes and languages creates a balance that, on a formal level, ignores questions of beauty in a classical sense: Bowes reproduces dated idyllic landscapes with great visionary power, in which the figures, unnaturally extended, seem to float in an irrational and fantastic space.
Man is a kind guest of nature, in which every other element communicates calm and serenity. Everything appears ancient, without nostalgia, and intends to revive the myth.

Share on: