Brick Walk Fine Art is pleased to open our Fall season with a two-person exhibition of works by Paul Bowen and MP Landis. Long time friends and collaborators, these two artists are deeply involved in materiality and surface in their work and both connect to underlying archetypes which provide compelling spiritual resonances.
Paul Bowen was born in Colwyn Bay, a coastal town in Wales, Great Britain. He studied at Chester Art School and the Newport College of Art in Wales and went to graduate school at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. Bowen lived and worked near the waterfront in Provincetown, Massachusetts for 30 years. He has always been interested in material with a history—wood he has scavenged that was once part of ships, houses, salt works, barrels, cable drums, or crates. He has also worked with ships' flags, tar, canvas, rope and other marine detritus. His drawings and prints derive their imagery from his environment and he has created his own inks from squid, Xerox toner and walnuts. His small-scale sculptures, constructed from wood fragments, use limited means such as stacking, piling, and simple carpentry and often appear to float across or torque away from the surface of the wall. He also builds large-scale sculptures, primarily commissioned for private homes and museums, with massive timbers, like those culled from old beer vats and other salvaged sources. Since moving to Vermont in September 2005, many of his drawings merge images of covered bridges with wharfs, reflecting his new environment as well as that of the Cape. His new sculptures combine sea-worn wood he has gathered from Provincetown's beaches with wood from the Wilder Dam in New Hampshire (sometimes chewed by beavers or stained with iron that has leached from surrounding rocks). Bowen has been a recipient of fellowships from the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Artist's Resource Trust. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College and his work is in many important public and private collections including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
M P Landis's current work is a palimpsest of the processes, materials and emotions of his existence. Landis has taught at the summer workshop program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He is a Creative and A&R Consultant for Northern-Spy Records. His work is represented in many private and public collections, including the New York Public Library, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, the Naples Museum of Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Before moving to Brooklyn in 1996, he lived year-round in Provincetown.