Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling (b. 1934) is a British-Guyanese artist. Known for his vivid explorations of colour, surface and material, Bowling bridges abstraction and cartography, autobiography and formal innovation. Born in Bartica, Guyana (then British Guiana), he moved to London in 1953 and studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, graduating in 1962.

Bowling’s early work engaged with figuration and social commentary, but by the late 1960s he had embraced abstraction, moving to New York and immersing himself in the debates surrounding Colour Field painting and Minimalism. His landmark Map Paintings — begun in 1967 — layer stencilled images of global maps beneath fields of luminous colour, expressing a diasporic perspective and postcolonial consciousness through the language of abstraction.

Across a career spanning more than six decades, Bowling has continually pushed the boundaries of painting. He incorporates unconventional materials — acrylic gel, metallic pigments and stitched canvas — to create richly textured works that hover between process and poetics. His paintings often carry the traces of gravity, poured or soaked with pigment, and are deeply informed by the physical act of making.

Despite being long under-recognised in the UK, Bowling’s influence has grown significantly. In 2005 he was elected the first Black Royal Academician, and in 2019 Tate Britain staged a major retrospective, affirming his place in the canon of contemporary painting. His work is held in collections including Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.