PAUL BOWEN

INVENTORY

INTRODUCTION

Cate McQuaid, writing in The Boston Globe, described Paul Bowen and his work this way: “…a sculptor from Wales, he has lived in Provincetown for 25 years, and he makes the detritus of the sea his materials… There’s something about the rough, splintered quality of wood coughed up by the ocean that can’t be tamed.”

Bowen has exhibited numerously nationally and internationally. His work is included in a number of museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City), Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Association of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Ghent, Belgium); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA). His work is also included in a number of public and corporate collections in Massachusetts, New York, Wales, and Japan.

His work lays bare a deep sense of place and a phenomenal understanding of the passage of time. His materials, mostly man-made in origin, are worn, battered, and aged when he finds them washed ashore or in the basement of an old house. Bowen crafts these bits and pieces into sculptures that embody both the new and the old, the now and the past, humanity weathered by nature.