Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Frank Bowling artist

Frank Bowling, OBE, RA, was born in 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana (now Guyana), and immigrated to England at the age of 19, settling in London. He began his career as a figurative painter, but following his encounters with American Expressionist painting in New York in the 1960s, his work moved towards abstraction. In 2005, Bowling was the first Black British artist to be elected a Royal Academician; a major retrospective was held at Tate Britain in 2019.

Born: 1934 Bartica, British Guiana (now Guyana)

Year of Migration to the UK: 1953

Other name/s: Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling


Biography

Painter Frank Bowling (né Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling) was born in Bartica, British Guiana (now Guyana) on 26 February 1934; his father was a police district paymaster and his mother a seamstress. In 1953, at the age of 19, Bowling immigrated to England, settling in London, where he lived with his uncle and studied poetry. In spite of his early ambition to become a poet and writer, after completing his National Service with the Royal Air Force, Bowling decided to study art, recalling that on his first visit to the National Gallery in London he was most struck by the paintings of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. From 1957-59 he took classes at Regent's Street Polytechnic, Chelsea College of Art, and City and Guilds of London Art School, before winning a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, where his fellow students included David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. He graduated in 1962 with a silver medal, having been tipped to win the gold but due to his marriage to Royal College Registrar Paddy Kitchen in 1960 (it was then forbidden for staff to fraternise with students), this was relegated to silver ('Frank Bowling, an overlooked star of British art’s golden generation', The New Statesman, 22nd May 2019). Later that year his first solo exhibition, Image in Revolt, was held at Grabowski Gallery, an avant-garde institution founded in 1959 in London's Chelsea by Lithuanian émigré, Mateusz Grabowski.

In 1966 Bowling moved to New York, where he was exposed to the paintings of his American contemporaries. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, near Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko, and formed a friendship with noted critic Clement Greenberg, who encouraged his tendencies towards abstraction. By 1971, the same year in which he was selected to exhibit in the Whitney Biennial, Bowling had abandoned the use of figurative imagery. His iconic Map Paintings (1967-71), which include the stencilled landmasses of South America, Africa, and Australia, embody his transition from figuration to pure abstraction. As a contributing editor at Arts Magazine (1969-72), Bowling 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. In 1969, Bowling organised and curated the seminal 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. In this way he succeeded in becoming a unifying force for his peers in a largely segregated art world. In 1971 he exhibited six large Map Paintings in a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and between 1973 and 1978, he experimented with ideas of chance and ‘controlled accidents’, pouring paint from a two-metre height to create his visually arresting ‘Poured Paintings’.

Bowling moved back to London in 1975, where he taught painting at the Camberwell School of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Painting and Sculpture. His sculptural paintings of the 1980s include embedded objects and thickly textured canvases, and have been described as evoking landscape, riverbeds and geologic strata. Legacies of both the English landscape tradition and American abstraction are visible in his work. Bowling shares Turner and Constable’s preoccupation with light, never more evident than in his dazzling paintings of the late 1980s. Bowling’s experiments with ammonia, gel, metallic and pearlescent paint create incandescent reactions on the canvas. His recent work encompasses collage, poured paint, stencilling, staining, and stitching canvases, bringing together techniques honed over a lifetime of painting. In 2005 Bowling was the first Black British artist to be elected a Royal Academician, and has exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts since then. In 2008 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and was knighted in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to art. His first major retrospective was held in 2019 at Tate Britain, the opening of which coincided with the release of BBC documentary, Frank Bowling's Abstract World. As of 2020 he is represented worldwide by Hauser and Wirth, who plan to host an exhibition of his work in London in May 2021, ahead of his solo show at Bristol's Arnolfini Gallery in July 2021. Bowling continues to work every day in his South London studio, accompanied by his second wife, Rachel, other family members and friends. His work is held in numerous UK public collections including the Government art Collection; the National Museum, Wales; the Royal Academy of Arts; Southwark Art Collection; Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Related books

  • Frank Bowling (London: Tate Publishing, 2019)
  • Laura Homer, 'Frank Bowling: Material Explorations', Tate Papers, No. 31, Spring 2019
  • Indie A. Choudhury, 'Frank Bowling’s White Paintings', Journal of Contemporary African Art, No. 45, November 2019,
  • Okwui Enwezor ed., Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi, Munich: Haus der Kunst (London and New York: Prestel, 2017)
  • Dorothy C. Rowe, Nonsynchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling’s Map Paintings, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Vol.17, No.2, 1 July, 2013, pp. 255-73
  • Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling, (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011)
  • Courtney Martin, They’ve All Got Painting: Frank Bowling’s Modernity and the Post-1960 Atlantic, in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, ed. by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter (London: Tate Publishing, 2010)
  • Jim Hunter and Frank Bowling, Frank Bowling OBE RA, Paintings (Winchester: The Gallery at Winchester Discovery Centre, 2009)
  • Jim Hunter, Frank Bowling: Big Paintings (Bournemouth: Arts Institute at Bournemouth, 2008)
  • Robin Greenwood and Martin Gayford, Pondlife and Other Paintings: New Work by Frank Bowling (London: Poussin Gallery, 2008)
  • Leon Wainwright, Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop, Third Text, Vol.22, No. 91, March 2008
  • Spencer A. Richards and Frank Bowling, Frank Bowling: 4 Decades with Color (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College, 2004)
  • Carl Hazlewood, Frank Bowling: Recent Paintings and Richard Baye: Recent Sculptures, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, No. 1, Fall/Winter 1994, pp. 59-60
  • Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling: Soundings Towards the Definition of an Individual Talent, in Rasheed Araeen ed., The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989)
  • Frederick L. Seidel, Frank Bowling Selected Paintings 1967-77 (London: Acme Gallery, 1977)
  • Indie A. Choudhury, 'Frank Bowling’s White Paintings', Journal of Contemporary African Art, No. 45, November 2019, pp. 34-47

Public collections

Related organisations

  • The Royal College of Art (student)
  • Slade School of Art (student)
  • Chelsea School of Art (student)
  • Regent's Street Polytechnic (student)
  • City and Guilds of London Art School (student)
  • Royal Academy of Arts (member)
  • Camberwell School of Art (teacher)
  • Byam Shaw School of Painting and Sculpture (teacher)
  • Reading University (lecturer)
  • University of Wolverhampton (Honorary Doctorate)
  • University of the Arts London (Honorary Fellow)
  • The Arts Institute at Bournemouth (Honorary Fellow)
  • Arts Magazine (contributing editor)
  • Young Commonwealth Artists Group (founder)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Frank Bowling, Arnolfini Gallery (2021)
  • Frank Bowling, Hauser and Wirth (2021)
  • Frank Bowling, Tate Britain (2019)
  • Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017)
  • solo exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts (2011)
  • Big Paintings, Wolverhampton University Art Gallery (2008)
  • Frank’s Colour: Paintings by Frank Bowling RA, Royal Academy Hush Casson Room for Friends (2006)
  • This Was Tomorrow: Art and the Sixties, Tate Britain (2004)
  • Tate Unseen, Tate (2002)
  • Frank Bowling, De La Warr Pavilion (1997)
  • Frank Bowling, The Cut Gallery (1995)
  • The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain, Hayward Gallery (1989)
  • Bowling through the Decade, The Royal West of England Academy (1989)
  • Frank Bowling, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (1988)
  • Frank Bowling, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (1988)
  • Frank Bowling: Paintings, 1983-1986, Serpentine Gallery (1986)
  • Frank Bowling Retrospective, Polytechnic Art Gallery, Newcastle (1978)
  • Frank Bowling, Acme Gallery (1976)
  • Frank Bowling, William Darby (1975)
  • Whitney Biennial (1971)
  • Frank Bowling, Graboswki Gallery (1963)
  • Image in Revolt, Grabowski Gallery (1962)
  Frank Bowling
   
Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Frank Bowling]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Frank Bowling] in the Ben Uri Library