Denis Bowen (1921-2006)

Bowen was a champion of non-figurative art and consistently worked in groundbreaking new styles. He founded the New Vision Group Gallery and New Vision Centre Gallery, both of which were internationalist and forward thinking in the Post-War era. From the 1950s to the mid-60s he was a pioneer of tachism; he used bold blocks of paint and free-form brush strokes, and his materials and gestural marks of this period acquired symbolic and emotional values. In 1957 he contributed to the Redfern Gallery's landmark Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract, an exhibition that put Bowen's painterly abstraction in context - among the other exhibitors were Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Sandra Blow, Adrian Heath and Gillian Ayres.