Frank Bowling

British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or "wave" of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2019, Bowling was the subject of a hugely successful retrospective in Tate Britain and, in 2022, opened a major show of works that took place from 1966 to 1975 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He is represented in more than fifty international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Tate Britain (London) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London). Bowling studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art and, later, the City and Guilds of London Art School. In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, where he joined fellow students David Hockney, R. Kitaj, Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield and Neil Stokoe.

Frank Bowling studied at Royal College of Art and City and Guilds of London Art School. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are abstract art. Places of work recorded in the authority are London, Boston and New Brunswick. Residence is recorded at London and New York City. Employment is recorded with Camberwell College of Arts. Works named in the authority record are Giving Birth Astride a Grave. Work by Frank Bowling is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Officer of the Order of the British Empire and Knight Bachelor.

• Honorific Prefix — Sir • Name — Frank Bowling • Birth Name — Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling • Born — 26 February 1934 • Birthplace — Bartica, British Guiana, South America • Education — Chelsea School of Art; Royal College of Art • Known for — Large-scale, abstract "map paintings", and his use of found objects • Movement — Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction • Spouse — Paddy Kitchen 1960–1966 Irena Delderfield (m. 1969) Rachel Scott 2013–present • Website — https: frankbowling.com/

Bowling was born on 26 February 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana, to Richard Bowling and his wife, Agatha. In 1940, Bowling's father moved the family to New Amsterdam so as to take up his post as accountant and paymaster in the local police force. Bowling's mother was a highly skilled seamstress, dressmaker, and milliner; she created a successful business from scratch and built a grand three-storey clapperboard building with a boldly lettered fascia that proclaimed: "Bowling's Variety Store". In May 1953, at the age of 19, Bowling emigrated to Britain, where he lived with an uncle in London and enrolled at Westminster College of Commerce to study English. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, Bowling met the future artist and architect Keith Critchlow. Influenced by Critchlow, Bowling went on to study art, despite earlier ambitions to be a poet and a writer. He lodged at his parents' house in Redcliffe Gardens, Chelsea, where he was painted by Critchlow, and he studied at the Chelsea School of Art. In 1959, Bowling won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art, where fellow students included artists such as David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. At the beginning of his studies there, Bowling concentrated on painting still-life compositions of bottles, animals, meat and figure drawings. His Sheep’s Head paintings, made in the autumn of 1960, were a series of muddy, murky intense works reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi and his muted colour palette. Another series of paintings produced in 1960, titled the Athletes, are characterised by vivid chromatic colour and dynamically asymmetrical compositions. Bowling graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962.

• Illustration — Frank Bowling, Philoctetes' Bow, 1987 By the early 1980s, dense, encrusted and flowing paintings, often using a large amount of gel, were a significant aspect of Bowling’s painterly practice. A turning point arrived in the summer of 1984, when he arrived at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine for an artist-teacher residency. Quite quickly, he began to incorporate a broad range of objects into his paintings such as newsprint, plastic and foam. In 1986, Bowling exhibited a group of major new paintings at the Serpentine Gallery in London, curated by Ronald Alley, then Keeper of Modern Art at the Tate Gallery. Among the works on display was Wintergreens (1986), now in the Royal Academy’s collection. A year after the show at the Serpentine Gallery, a key work from the same year, Spreadout Ron Kitaj (1986), was acquired by Tate. Also in 1987, Bowling created Philoctete’s Bow, a work characterised by complex, textured surfaces, essentially additive and collage-like (involving stitching, patching and gluing fragments to the surface). Towards the end of the 1980s, Bowling made his Great Thames series of paintings (1989), in homage to the great English landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Gainsborough. This was also the period Bowling started making sculpture. Seven sculptures resulted. For the 1988 exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, he made a further group of sculptures in galvanised steel.

• Illustration — Frank Bowling, Epps, 2009 In 2009, Bowling produced a series of vertical and horizontal "zippers" paintings, including Epps, Litchfield and Chinese Chance (all 2009), suggesting tall skies or long horizons. In 2011, Bowling presented new works known as the Crossings at ROLLO Contemporary Art in London. In these paintings, bands of colour are overloaded along the centre of the canvas creating a thickly textured build-up of contrasting colour. Crossing: Snakeheadpassage (2011) and Crossing: Liberty (2011) are two such examples. In 2017, there was a retrospective of his work at Haus der Kunst in Munich. A major retrospective exhibition of his work was on view at Tate Britain in 2019. Land of Many Waters, a major exhibition of unseen works by Bowling, alongside key paintings from the previous decade, was exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2021. In 2022, the Stephen Lawrence Gallery at the University of Greenwich focused on his sculptures and the sculptural aspects of his paintings in an exhibition called Frank Bowling and sculpture. The exhibition Frank Bowling's Americas was at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 22 October 2022 to 9 April 2023 and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from 13 May to 10 September 2023. Bowling's paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions in continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States and are included in major private and corporate collections worldwide. His work can also be seen in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Tate Gallery in London. In 2024 The Tate Library in Brixton hosted an exhibition of his work with discussions and workshops about his art as part of Black History month.

From the late 1960s onwards, Bowling’s work appeared in many of the century’s most important exhibitions that centred upon the work of Black-British and Afro-Caribbean artists. Historian and artist Eddie Chambers notes how Bowling took part in an important, though now largely forgotten, 1978 London exhibition entitled Afro-Caribbean Art alongside a variety of other major artists from Africa and its diasporic populations. Participants included Lubaina Himid, Donald Locke, Eugene Palmer, Mohamed Ahmed Abdalla and Keith Ashton. Bowling was also featured in the highly influential 1989 exhibition The Other Story, held in London’s South Bank Centre. The show sought to survey the history of postwar, Black-British art, serving as one of only two shows to ever tackle the subject matter. Curated by the London-based, Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen, the landmark show sought to demonstrate the ways in which the history of contemporary non-Western art could be understood as both a variety of independent art-historical narratives as well as integral to a mainstream story of global art history. Araeen devised this curatorial approach as a protest against what he took to be a pervasive way of marginalising non-Western art histories in which artists working outside of the Western canon would be presented as existing within an insular, Western-adjacent canon. Participants included Rasheed Araeen, Salim Arif, Eddie Chambers, Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody.

Bowling married textile artist Rachel Scott in 2013. While working at the Royal College of Art, he met the novelist, biographer and art critic Paddy Kitchen when she was a member of staff there. They married in 1960 (divorcing in 1966) and had one son, who is now deceased: Richard Sheridan Bowling (1962–2001), known as Dan Bowling. Frank Bowling has two other sons: Ben Bowling (born 1962), Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at King's College London, whose mother is the artist Claire Spencer; and Sacha Bowling (born 1964), a film maker and photographer, whose mother is Irena Delderfield Bowling (whom Bowling married in 1969).

Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master". Writing for Art Basel, the art curator Sam Cornish said: "Central to Bowling’s art is an astonishing aliveness to the mutability of color, as hue and material, combined with a flair for accumulating granular visual detail into dramatic, large-scale panoramas".

• Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, 2025 • Collage, Hauser & Wirth, Paris, 2025. [solo] • Frank Bowling’s Americas, New York, 1966–75. Museum of Fine Arts Boston and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2022–23. • Frank Bowling: Penumbral Light. Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, 2022. • Frank Bowling: Sculpture. Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich Galleries, London, 2022. • Frank Bowling: Wolfgang Hahn Prize. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, 2022. • Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia, Dallas Museum of Art, 2021–22. • Frank Bowling: Land of Many Waters. Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, 2021. • Frank Bowling: London/New York, Hauser & Wirth, London and New York, 2021. • Frank Bowling. Tate Britain. London, 2019. • Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Tate Modern, London, 2018. • Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi. Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2017–18. • Frank Bowling: Map Paintings, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, 2015. • Journeyings: Recent Works on Paper by Frank Bowling RA. Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011. • Frank Bowling RA: Crossings. Rollo Contemporary Art, London, 2011. • Frank Bowling: Full of Light – A Survey Exhibition Featuring Paintings from 1978 to 2004. G.R. N’Namdi Gallery, Detroit, Michigan, United States, 2005. • Bending the Grid: Black Identity and Resistance in the Art of Frank Bowling. Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey, United States, 2003. • Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes. Venice Biennale, 2003. • Frank Bowling: Bowling on Through the Century. Multiple venues, 1996–67. • Frank Bowling: Painting. Serpentine Gallery, London, 1986. • Frank Bowling. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971.

• Alloway, Lawrence, Hunter, Sam and Bowling, Frank. 5+1. New York: State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1969. • Alley, Ronald. Frank Bowling. London: Serpentine Gallery, 1986. • Enwezor, Okwuri; with contributions by Frank Bowling, Okwui Enwezor, Rose Jones, Kobena Mercer, Anna Schneider, Zoe Whitley, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi. Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2014. • Crippa, Elena, ed. Frank Bowling. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. • Brace, Gemma. Frank Bowling. Land of Many Waters. Bristol: Arnolfini, 2021.

His work is associated with Color Field. He was employed by Camberwell College of Arts. He belonged to Royal Academy of Arts. He worked at London, Boston, New Brunswick and New York City.

Frank Bowling is recorded as having received Guggenheim Fellowship, Officer of the Order of the British Empire and Knight Bachelor.

• Illustration — Frank Bowling, Cover Girl, 1966 Bowling’s artistic career began with his first commercial exhibition, Image in Revolt, at the Grabowski Gallery in Chelsea, London, in October 1962. In autumn 1963, Bowling had begun to teach painting at Camberwell School of Art in London. There, with the assistance of the textiles department, he amassed a stockpile of canvas pieces bearing the image of his mother’s emporium screen-printed in red or green. The first painting in which the image was deployed was Cover Girl (1966). The title refers to the young woman with the Mary Quant-style dress and the Vidal Sassoon helmet haircut, an image appropriated from the cover of an Observer colour supplement of March 1966. The masterpiece of the first phase of Frank Bowling’s career is Mirror (1964–66), the culmination of years of development in London. In this painting, Bowling appears twice: at the top of a spiral staircase from the Royal College of Art’s painting school, and at the foot of the stairwell, a metaphor for transition and emergence. In between is the figure of Paddy Kitchen.

• Illustration — Frank Bowling, Polish Rebecca, 1971 From around 1967 to 1971, shortly after arriving in New York, Bowling made a group of works now known as the map paintings. For Bowling, the map motif served both as evocative subject matter and as device to organize the flat, modernist picture plane. Bowling elected to present three of these epically proportioned canvases – Marcia H Travels (1970), Texas Louise (1971), and Australia to Africa (1971) – together with two marginally smaller works, Polish Rebecca (1971) and Traveling with Robert Hughes (1969-70), in his first solo museum exhibition, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 4 November to 6 December 1971.

• Illustration — Frank Bowling, Grating Rhymes, 1978 In 1974, Bowling constructed a movable wood platform, pivoted like a seesaw, so that paint could be poured onto unstretched canvas pegged to the tilted surface. Known as the poured paintings, they were characterised by their upright, rectangular format, linearity of cascading poured paint and masked edges. The combination of chance and precise technique resulted in process-driven works that share affinities with a long lineage of abstract painting. The poured paintings were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2012.

Bowling's works can be found in more than 50 international public institutions, including: • Tate Britain, London • Museum of Modern Art, New York • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York • Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan • Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco • Pinault Collection, Bourse du Commerce, Paris • Moderna Museet, Stockholm • Museum Ludwig, Cologne • Royal Academy of Arts, London • Museum of Art, Łódź, Poland • Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota • Victoria and Albert Museum, London • The Menil Collection, Houston • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York