Introducing: Caroline Bowder Ridger
Urban Surface and Abstract Memory: Introducing Caroline Bowder-Ridger
Caroline graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art (now UCA) in 1991 and has lived and worked in Peckham for over 25 years. Her long-term engagement with London’s changing landscape informs a practice rooted in observation rather than representation.
We are pleased to introduce Caroline Bowder Ridger, a London-based abstract painter whose work explores the physical and psychological traces of urban life. Working from her studio overlooking Brixton High Street, Caroline’s paintings distill the city’s energy into layered surfaces that sit between abstraction, memory, and material record.
Contexts and influences
Caroline’s paintings are built through repeated layering, editing and erosion. Oil paint is applied with brushes, palette knives and mono-printing, then scratched back or sanded down, allowing earlier marks to resurface. This process situates her work within a lineage of artists concerned with surface as archive — where time, gesture and revision remain visible.
' Bühler Höhe' Gerhard Richter, 1991
Her approach recalls aspects of Gerhard Richter's scraped abstractions, particularly in the way paint is simultaneously constructed and disrupted. Caroline’s work prioritizes process and material as carriers of meaning rather than illusion or narrative.
'Urban Primrose' Caroline Bowder-Ridger, 2025
Across Caroline’s recent works, repeated shapes and fragmented structures operate as visual metaphors for the city. In Urban Patterns the repeated motifs and dense surface layering echo the structured abstraction of Piet Mondrian, though softened and destabilized by erosion and chance. 
'Komposition mit Rot, Gelb, Blau' Piet Mondrian, 1929
Where Mondrian pursued ideal balance, Caroline allows disruption and imperfection to remain visible — grounding abstraction in lived environment. 
'Urban Fragments' Caroline Bowder-Ridger, 2025
Urban Fragments draws closer to post-war European abstraction, particularly the fragmented pictorial spaces seen in the work of Nicolas de Staël.
'Agrigente' Nicolas De Staël, 1953
Here, abstraction becomes a way of holding together memory, structure and sensation without resolving into a fixed image.
'City Movement' Caroline Bowder-Ridger, 2025
Finally, City Movement introduces rhythm and directional flow, recalling early abstract experiments by Wassily Kandinsky, where movement and emotion are conveyed through form alone. Caroline’s marks, however, remain tethered to the physicality of place, grounded, less symbolic.
Why Her Work Resonates
Caroline Bowder Ridger’s paintings sit comfortably within a broader history of abstraction while remaining distinctly contemporary. Her work does not aim to depict the city, but to record it. through surface, repetition and erasure. In doing so, she continues a tradition explored by artists across the 20th and 21st centuries who have used abstraction as a means of engaging with environment, memory and time.