Lady with Flowers
Dean BOWEN
Australia born 1957
Lady with flowers 2017
Bronze
Dean Bowen grew up in the regional Victorian town of Maryborough. He studied printmaking at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology but attributes an abiding interest in nature, animals and birds as recurrent subjects in his work to his rural upbringing.
This also explains, in part, the artist’s embrace of the innocence and whimsicality of ‘outsider art’ or ‘Art Brut’ – a term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe seemingly naïve imagery created mostly by self-taught artists working outside artistic conventions.
Dubuffet’s own repertoire of craggy, flattened-out and intensely gazing figures influenced Bowen’s work in all media.
Although Lady with flowers is modelled in the round it has the dominant frontal projection and humorous appeal typical of Bowen’s sculpture that features the same quirky and playful subjects found in his paintings and prints.