Over the course of six decades, Frank Bowling has relentlessly pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. Ambitious in scale and scope, his dynamic engagement with the materiality of his chosen medium, and its evolution in the broad sweep of art history, has resulted in paintings of unparalleled originality and power. Bowling has been hailed as one of the foremost British artists of his generation. Born in Guyana in 1934, he arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognized as an assured force in London’s art scene. During this period, his highly individual language of painting, which emerged from expressionistic figuration and pop art, encompassed autobiographical elements and the artist’s socio-political concerns.

Bowling went on to divide his time between the art scenes in London and New York, maintaining studios in both cities. This transatlantic orientation was to see his early engagement with expressive figuration and pop art shift to an immersion in abstraction which continues in his practice today. Visible in his work are the legacies of both the English landscape tradition and American abstraction from which Bowling honed a distinctive vocabulary, combining figurative, abstract and symbolic elements. As Bowling has explained, ‘I was always very conscious of scratching out and of new interpretations replacing the old; updating traditions.’

A major reorientation in Bowling’s practice came in 1966 when he relocated from London to New York, at a time when the artistic scene was divided along lines of formalism and politics. In New York, Bowling pushed his work in new directions. He met Jasper Johns and engaged in dialogue with his contemporaries, such as Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards, Al Loving, and Daniel Johnson. In 1969, Bowling organized, curated, and wrote the catalogue essay for the notable exhibition, ‘5+1’, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Princeton University, which showcased the work of five African American abstract artists as well as his own recent paintings. He expressed frustration at the critical invisibility of Black artists and the narrow parameters by which his art and that of his peers was being assessed. Through his writings, as a contributing editor of Arts Magazine (1969-1972), he resisted what he saw as the reductive categorization of ‘Black Art’ as purely political in subject matter, staking a claim for abstraction.

By 1971 Bowling’s visionary approach to painting fused abstraction with personal memories. Concerns of color, surface and process gained in prominence resulting in his iconic series of ‘Map Paintings’, which include the stenciled landmasses of South America, Africa and Australia. Over the years, the points of reference in his work reflect Bowling’s interest in a wide scope of art history, from Constable and Turner, to Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. From 1973 to 1978, Bowling experimented with ideas of chance and ‘controlled accidents’, pouring paint from a two-meter height to create his visually arresting ‘Poured Paintings’, an expansion from color field painting.

Bowling returned to London in 1975 but continued to spend significant periods in New York. His sculptural paintings of the 1980s include embedded objects and thickly textured canvases, and have been described as evoking landscape, riverbeds and geological strata. Bowling shares Turner and Constable’s preoccupation with light, which is never more evident than in his expansive ‘Great Thames’ paintings of the late 1980s.

Today Bowling’s mastery of the painted medium and explorations of light, color, and geometry incorporate the use of ammonia and multilayered washes. His restless reinvention of the painted plane endures in his current bodies of work which continue to break new ground through his use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas and metallic and pearlescent pigments. At the age of 86, Bowling works every day in his South London studio, accompanied by his wife, Rachel, other family members and friends, forever driven by his fascination with exploring the vast and radiant possibilities of paint.

Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005 and was awarded the OBE for services to Art in 2008. His work is represented in fifty international museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Tate, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, as well as collections in Guyana, Jamaica, Australia, Germany and Portugal.

Bowling’s work has been exhibited extensively which has cemented his place in the post-war canon of contemporary and modern art. In 1971, Bowling had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where he showed his iconic ‘Map Paintings’. A 1986 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London focused on his sculptural paintings of the 1980s. A turning point in Bowling’s career came in 2003 when his ‘Map Paintings’, which had been in storage and unseen since the early 1970s, were the center-piece of the exhibition ‘Faultlines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes’, at the 50th Venice Biennale. His work drew much attention and paved the way for him becoming a Royal Academician in 2005.

Bowling exhibited ‘Works on Paper’ at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2011. The following year, Bowling had a one-room exhibition of his ‘Poured Paintings’ (1973-78) at Tate Britain. His major solo show, ‘Mappa Mundi’, opened at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2017, and toured to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, in 2018. In 2017, two of Bowling’s ‘Map Paintings’ were included in the landmark show ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’, which began its international tour at Tate Modern before travelling to the Brooklyn Museum and from there to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston. In 2019, Bowling’s long-awaited and highly regarded retrospective at the Tate Britain – subtitled ‘The Possibilities of Paint are Endless’ – showcased his entire six-decades long career. Bowling is the subject of a BBC documentary, ‘Frank Bowling’s Abstract World’, which coincided with the opening of the Tate Retrospective.