Born in Cape Town, Richard Butler Bowdon’s ethos has been that of a citizen of the world, and whether he is in the Sudan, Thailand, the Netherlands, or in his current home in Melbourne, Australia, his utmost dedication is to art and the art community. Fundamentally, his practice is an outcome of this open and non-hierarchical curiosity in humanity. Taking on the most formal and historical traditions of portraiture, Butler Bowdon challenges the viewer to break with these very conventions and presumptions that accompany lofty tradition by taking his observations from those living in the diaspora. His subjects are contra-historical; they are contemporary and undeniably compelling. Far from the exotic, Butler Bowdon’s paintings create magnetic and subversive narratives that invite the viewer into the world of ‘the other’, to enter a dynamic gaze that is defiant to preconceptions.

“Portraiture is perhaps the most complex and difficult of genres precisely because it appears to declare the obvious and is easily contested. It seems difficult to say something new in a field, where the task is both to challenge the photograph in its accuracy and to deliver wisdom and measured insight in an age of immediate gratification. Yet this is precisely the task that Richard Butler Bowdon made his life’s work. Situating his practice geographically, historically and culturally in Africa, has become an exercise in brinksmanship of an emphatic and empathetic onlooker and a participant, who can challenge the cannons of a deeply Eurocentric genre, while excelling in it at the same time. Butler Bowdon’s painting and collage practice present a dynamic and unpredictable oscillation of perspective, not only of Africans in Africa and diaspora but also of the way art history has engaged with Africa. With taciturn understatement, Butler Bowdon holds up a mirror up not to his subjects but to his audiences, forcing us to reckon with our own humanity at odds with the legacy of our histories.

Richard Butler Bowdon, presents the fractured mirror of contemporary African identities. His portraits of Africans living in exile in diaspora present a historical mosaic of migration from the disappointed idealists, like The Patriot to those reconciled to the way things are and have to be like The Patient One or those who like The Protagonist take life by the scruff of the neck and forge new paths for themselves and others. These personages communicate both as real people and as types that we can recognize and connect with as existing in every social grouping. Our shared humanity through these images, overwhelms the attempts at cultural and the ethnic division engendered by history. Conversely in Butler Bowdon’s collages turn the mirror squarely to the viewer. We are struck by the interplay between ritual objects, which have become the personification of Africa to the Western gaze and the reality of contemporary life and spiritual practices in Africa, as well as modes of representation, which move between photography, collage and masks, all of which speak to the history Western perception Africa from the artistic “borrowings” of Picasso to the ethnographic classification and plunder of artifacts. Whether in painting or collage, Butler Bowdon subverts the immediate reaction, with an afterthought. While the aesthetics of his works are impeccable and seductive, we are never allowed to get away with mere admiration. Each work opens a door to a conversation, about ourselves and the history of humanity, in the African context and beyond.”

- Valerie Kabov, First Floor Gallery, Harare

SOLO EXHBITIONS

2018
‘The Existentialist And Others’, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa

2016
‘The Mirror Complex’, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa

2011
‘Austral Africa’, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe

2009
‘Richard Butler-Bowdon’, Until Never Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2006
‘The Aesthetic Cell’, Until Never Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2003
‘Recent Portraits’, BUS Artist-Run-Space, Melbourne, Australia

2002
‘Twelve Contemporary Australians’, Gallery 4A, Asian Australian Artists Assoc., Sydney, Australia

2001
‘Huan the Dispersion, A Cathartic Fantasy in Three Parts’, Ist Floor Artist and Writers Space, Melbourne, Australia

1999
‘The Familiar Exotic’, Talk Artists Initiative, Melbourne, Australia Function at the Mirage, Citylights 2000, Melbourne, Australia

1997
Nexus Multicultural Gallery, Lions Art Centre, Adelaide, Australia

SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2026
'A Very Loop Street Winter, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa

2023
Investec Cape Town Art Fair, EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, South Africa
‘Africa Supernova’, Museum Kade, Amersfoort, Netherlands

2021
‘Looking In’, EBONY/CURATED, Bordeaux House, Franschhoek, South Africa
‘Reclaiming Magic’ Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, coordinated by Yinka Shonibare, London, United Kingdom

2020
ARCO Lisboa, First Floor Gallery Harare, Lisbon, Portugal

2018
Karigamombe Centre inaugural exhibition, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe

2017
London Art Fair ‘Dialogues Project’ curated by Miguel Amado, First Floor Gallery Harare, London, United Kingdom
‘Another Antipodes/Urban Axis’, PSAS, Fremantle, Australia
London Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, London, United Kingdom

2016
AKAA, First Floor Gallery Harare, Paris, France
Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa

2015
Summa Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid, Spain
Joburg Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa
Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa

2014
1:54 Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, London, United Kingdom
Joburg Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa

2013
1:54 Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, London, United Kingdom

2010
‘The New Jerusalem’, Curated by Christos Tsiolkas & Zoe Ali, City Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
‘Unearthed’, Blender Studios, Off the Kerb Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2009
‘Felt-Tip Pen Show’, Rearview, Melbourne, Australia
‘Hidden Faces of the Archibald’, Smartartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

2008
‘Revolving Doors’, UPLANDS Gallery, Prahran, Australia

2007
‘The Space in-Between – The Book Project’, Margaret Laurence Gallery, Victoria, Australia

2005
‘Dinner Party’, Ember 67, Melbourne, Australia

2004
‘Southern’, HOME Gallery Prague, Czech Republic

2003
’67% Say We Were Misled’, Sweden Bridge, Vienna, Austria / Dublin Artspace Dublin, EIRE

2001
‘Eat my Art’, TCB Chinatown, Melbourne, Australia

PUBLICATIONS

2023
Africa Supernova. 2023. Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort. ISBN 978 9 490153 38 0