David Bowes is an American painter, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, and first recognized during the early 1980s in New York's East Village. Bowes' contemporaries include artists George Condo, Keith Haring, and Jean Michel Basquiat.

In the September 2002 issue of Art in America the poet Carter Ratcliff wrote:
"....Bowes practices what might be called hieroglyphic figuration. With just a few strokes of a loaded brush, he can indicate an elaborately costumed figure or the sinuous gestures of a tropical vine. Of course, some renderings are more hieroglyphic than others. The larger the form, the more fully Bowes employs the familiar devices of figure painting. Modeling becomes a painterly caress as he gives...