Frank Bowling

Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters",[2] as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools"[3] and as a "modern master".

[4] In 2019, Bowling was the subject of a hugely successful retrospective at 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.

In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, where he joined fellow students David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Patrick Caulfield.

[1] In May 1953, at the age of 19, Bowling emigrated to Britain,[9] where he lived with an uncle in London and enrolled at Westminster College of Commerce to study English.

[6] In 1959, Bowling won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art,[11] where fellow students included artists such as David Hockney,[12] Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips.

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.

[13] Bowling’s artistic career began with his first commercial exhibition, Image in Revolt, at the Grabowski Gallery in Chelsea, London, in October 1962.

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 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.

For Bowling, the map motif served both as evocative subject matter and as device to organize the flat, modernist picture plane.

[14] 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.

The combination of chance and precise technique resulted in process-driven works that share affinities with a long lineage of abstract painting.

[15][16] 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.

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.

Participants included Lubaina Himid, Donald Locke, Eugene Palmer, Mohamed Ahmed Abdalla and Keith Ashton.

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.

Paintings from his first months in the city understandably spring from pop art influences that had characterised his art over the past years but, around 1969, Bowling worked with personal photographs, letters, and cutout stencils of continents, overlapping references to geography, memory, and history in canvases he stained and splattered with liquid sweeps of acrylic paint.

In 1984, Bowling spent a productive nine weeks as an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in rural Maine, United States, where he was inspired by the green landscape of the surrounding countryside.

However, Bowling more fundamentally maintains the famously modernist understanding of painting, and art-making more generally, as a profoundly intellectual act that, as Kobena Mercer notes, “demanded continuous reflection on the ideas, sources and materials of their work”.

Stuart Hall notes how the African and diasporic artists of Bowling’s generation understood their appropriation of modernist abstraction, a European style, as a critical or postcolonial endeavour.

Rasheed Araeen, the Pakistani conceptual artist and famed curator of The Other Story, calling modernism “the only way of dealing with the aspirations of our time”.