The Sacrarium

As was the case with quite a few of his contemporaries, Eric Bowen’s tryst with tantra came via exposure to European modernism—it was after settling in Oslo, Norway, in 1971, that his art started relating to his native country’s ongoing experimentation with tantra in art. The title of this work, The Sacrarium, alludes to a sanctum sanctorum of a temple encasing a deity that emanates energy outwards, depicted through a series of rectangular shell-like frames—in paint inside and in wood on the outside. The tantric abstraction of the work lies in its geometric interpretation of the deity and its energy.