Who was David Bowie for the world of art? by Ana Crețiu

The world of art mourns the loss of the musician, artist and actor David Bowie, who lost his battle with cancer on the 11^th of January, at he age of 69. As a collector of Modern and contemporary art, he started studying it at Bromley Technical High School, continuing to create works throughout his life. The Gallery on Cork Street, London, hosted his first one-man exhibition of paintings in 1995.

Besides creating and collecting art, Bowie also enjoyed writing about it. He was the co-founder of 21, an art-book publishing project that originated in 1997 and the magazine of Modern Painters had him as a frequent contributor and editorial board member.  In 1996 he wrote a piece about the importance of the late graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, saying then that “For the briefest flicker of a tiny moment in the mid-80s, New York's streets and subways came alive with Twomblyesque cave-scratchings and the screaming confusion of five-fingered fury.”

The same year, Bowie played Andy Warhol in the movie Basquiat. 

  

The same year, but in another Modern Painters piece, he spoke to Damien Hirst on the eve of his solo show at Gagosian gallery in New York. Bowie questioned Hirst about mortality, saying: “What seems to define your work as being so different from that of your peers is a far greater degree of personal passion. A strong resentment of the idea of death. It certainly strikes me as emotive, a reverberation of sorts.”

His retrospective, “David Bowie Is”, that opened in 2013 at the Victoria & Albert Museum is currently on show in the Netherlands, after another seven venues. According to the organisers, the show includes more than 300 objects demonstrating how “Bowie’s work has both influenced and been influenced by wider movements in art, design, theatre and contemporary culture”.  One thing is for sure, David Bowie’s legacy will go on for a long time, as he greatly influenced the world of British music, acting scene, and art.