Artist Ian Graham Bow is best known for his enduring contribution to Australian sculpture throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s. He was born in 1914 in Fitzroy, Victoria, the son of Scottish immigrants, John Roger Bow, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Mary Imrie (née Graham). During the 1930s, he attended Melbourne Technical School and Melbourne Teachers’ College. Bow completed his teacher training in 1934 focusing his studies on drawing and applied arts. The following year, he married fellow school teacher Winifred Nellie Dewey. Eventually, Bow and his young family settled in the Melbourne suburb of East Kew.
The early 1940s were an artistically productive period for Bow. In 1940 his work was first represented in the annual member exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, having joined the group in 1939. For the ensuing fifteen years, Bow’s creative output centred upon painting: landscapes, interiors and still-life compositions.
Bow was a regular exhibitor at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Art Gallery where he held several solo exhibitions. By May 1945 for his solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery he had amassed some 45 oil paintings of wide-ranging subjects. Bow persisted with his goal of establishing himself as a painter in Melbourne’s artistic sphere throughout the 1940s and ’50s. He continued to exhibit regularly as a member of the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS) and in 1946, Bow was on the editorial committee of the Society’s journal 'Genre’.
Throughout his artistic career, Bow continued to teach. During 1940, he was master at Caulfield Technical College as well as a lecturer at Melbourne Teachers College from 1942-44. Bow took positions of Art Master at Camberwell Grammar, Melbourne, and Haileybury College, Melbourne in 1945, where he taught until 1971. In 1944, Bow’s passion for sharing knowledge extended to the role of art instructor for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) of Victoria. When the WEA was replaced by the Council of Adult Education (CAE) Bow was appointed to the role of art lecturer, a position he held from 1948 until 1969. The role offered Bow great variety, including the provision of art instruction to inmates (some serving life sentences) of Pentridge Prison.
In 1949, Ian and Winnie separated. Bow met and formed a relationship with Andrea Pitt Doubleday. The couple built a modest home in Macleod, which at that time was an outer suburb north-east of Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Bow’s career continued to gain momentum, in part fuelled by the selection of his Portrait of John Bayard, n.d., for the 1950 Archibald Prize, and by an overseas study tour he undertook during 1950-51. While overseas Bow attended the 1950 Venice Biennale, toured Italy and France, and spent time in the United Kingdom studying art-school organization and teaching. Bow also visited Henry Moore, the prominent sculptor and public figure, who advocated that sculpture, rather than painting, was the art form with greatest ties to public and social concerns.
Following his return to Australia, Bow became increasingly dissatisfied with the politics of art openly expressed in articles published in 'Meanjin’.
A retrospective exhibition of Bow’s work was displayed at the VAS gallery in 1954. It coincided with the publication of a monograph by Clive Turnbull’s The Art of Ian Bow, 1954, which captured in print a selection of the artist’s paintings which exemplified his fifteen-year career. Turnbull described Bow as a “painter of our time…eager to explore ways of painting.”
In the early 1950s Ian Bow also produced prints, including lino-cuts that later informed a series of cast metal wall sculptures completed by Bow in the 1960s.
In 1956, while making sketches for a painting, Bow’s ideas for a sculptural series “The Attitudes and Passions of Man” first took form. Bow remarked that up to that time he “…just did pieces of construction work and sculpture to assist the form in my painting…As it turned out…I was really a latent sculptor… .”
Bow’s self-realization focused his creativity onto crafting in three dimensions rather than two. His early bronzes, The durable man, c.1955, and Head of Venus, 1958, were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1959, Spencer Shier studios produced a documentary entitled: Man into Metal: Sculpture by Ian Bow. That same year Bow resigned his VAS membership, and joined the Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Victoria, until 1961.
In 1961 Bow was invited to participate in the first Mildura Sculpture Triennial event to which he sent four bronzes and a cast aluminium sculpture. Thus Bow’s life-long link with the town at the far north-west of Victoria was established.
Throughout the 1960s Bow continued to exhibit widely, including: the Mildura Sculpture Triennial events of 1964, 1967, and 1970; the ‘Transfield’ exhibition during the mid-1960s; and, the 1966 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition ‘Alcorso-Sekers’ Travelling Scholarship Award for Sculpture. He received numerous commissions, among them: a wall sculpture “to create a significant feature in harmony with the new interior design of Michael’s Pharmacy,” Melbourne; the 1966 bronze dedication plaque titled Man, Vision and Perception, for Mildura Arts Centre, and, in 1969 a commission for a tactile work, later titled Urban Cycle, 1975, cast in bronze and tin, for the Blind Citizens’ Community Centre in Kooyong, Melbourne.
In 1971, surgery to remove a tumour of the pituitary gland rendered Bow legally blind and left him paralysed in his dominant hand. Urban Cycle was his last commission. Ian Bow passed away at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital on 17 November, 1989, aged 75. His work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Galleries in regional Victorian cities that boast Bow’s work include Ballarat, Bendigo, Gippsland, Hamilton, Heide, Mildura, Mornington Peninsula, and Shepparton, while representation in University collections is at Melbourne University.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2018
- Last updated:
- 2025
