Frank Bowling

Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling ( Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934), known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana.

He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction.

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".

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.

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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The poured paintings were the subject of an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2012.

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.

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.