Frank Bowling

Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling ( Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934), and as a "modern master". 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.

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.

"Poured paintings" (1974–1978)

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.

1980s

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.

2000s to the present

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.

Art criticism, curatorial work and teaching

From 1969 to 1972, Bowling was a critic and contributing editor at Arts Magazine, where he rejected the idea that "artists who happen to be black" should be making overtly political or protest art, and defended those engaged in abstraction. His critical writings represent a significant contribution to intellectual debates on "black art". His writings have been included in several publications such as The Soul of a Nation Reader and Mappa Mundi.

In 1969, he organised an important exhibition at Stony Brook University, New York, titled 5+1

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).

Style and influences

Over the course of six decades, Bowling has pursued a practice which expands the possibilities and properties of paint. His engagement with the materiality of his chosen medium, and its evolution in art history, has resulted in paintings of originality and power.

In his earliest works, Bowling was influenced by the work of Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. From 1962 onwards, Bowling began to think deeply about geometry as an architectonic principle in his paintings. His interest in this direction dated at least from his Royal College dissertation on Piet Mondrian. The diptych Big Bird (1964) and Mirror (1964–66) are major examples of the importance of geometry to his work.

A notable change in Bowling’s style occurred in 1966, shortly after arriving in New York. 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. At this point, he befriended pop artists Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, who were instrumental in his development as a painter.

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. Bowling’s paintings from the mid-1980s assimilated his memories of classical English landscape painting with the revelation at Skowhegan. It was at this point that Bowling began incorporating objects into his paintings, influenced by the painter Larry Poons.

The sculptures Bowling made for the 1988 Royal West of England Academy recall the work of a number of modernist sculptors, among them Bowling’s friend David Evison, Brian Wall, John Panting and William Turnbull.

Art historians and critics have understood Bowling as a late proponent of modernism. This can easily be observed in his career-long engagement with abstract expressionism. 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. He writes, "However 'modern art' was seen by them as an international creed, fully consistent with anti-colonialism which was regarded as intrinsic to a modern consciousness". 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". This emphasis on modernist art as a means of reflective critique, though not necessarily political, is theorised by modernist critic Clement Greenberg, one of Bowling's most important influences, in essays such as "Modernist Painting".

Critical assessment Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", He was among about a dozen artists proposed to fill one of two vacancies in the 80-member academy, and is the first black artist to be elected a Royal Academician in the history of the institution. He was knighted in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to art. He was awarded the 2022 Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig.

Selected exhibitions 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. 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.