41 Facts About Frank Bowling

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

Frank Bowling is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

In 2019, Frank 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.

Frank Bowling is represented in more than fifty international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Britain and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Frank Bowling studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art and, later, the City and Guilds of London Art School.

Frank Bowling was born on 26 February 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana, to Richard Frank Bowling and his wife, Agatha.

In 1940, Frank 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.

Frank 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: "Frank Bowling's Variety Store".

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

Frank Bowling 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, Frank Bowling concentrated on painting still-life compositions of bottles, animals, meat and figure drawings.

Frank Bowling graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962.

The masterpiece of the first phase of Frank Bowling's career is Mirror, the culmination of years of development in London.

From around 1967 to 1971, shortly after arriving in New York, Frank Bowling made a group of works now known as the map paintings.

In 1974, Frank Bowling constructed a movable wood platform, pivoted like a seesaw, so that paint could be poured onto unstretched canvas pegged to the tilted surface.

In 1986, Frank 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.

Also in 1987, Frank Bowling created Philoctete's Bow, a work characterised by complex, textured surfaces, essentially additive and collage-like.

In 2009, Frank Bowling produced a series of vertical and horizontal "zippers" paintings, including Epps, Litchfield and Chinese Chance, suggesting tall skies or long horizons.

In 2011, Frank Bowling presented new works known as the Crossings at ROLLO Contemporary Art in London.

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 from 13 May to 10 September 2023.

Frank 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.

From 1969 to 1972, Frank 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.

Frank Bowling's writings have been included in several publications such as The Soul of a Nation Reader and Mappa Mundi.

Frank Bowling held teaching positions at many institutions, including at Camberwell School of Art, where he taught painting in 1963, and lectureships at the University of Reading ; Columbia University, New York ; Rutgers University, New Jersey ; and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.

Historian and artist Eddie Chambers notes how Frank Bowling took part in an important, though now largely forgotten, 1978 London exhibition entitled Afro-Caribbean Art alongside a variety of other major artists from Africa and its diasporic populations.

Frank Bowling was featured in the highly influential 1989 exhibition The Other Story, held in London's South Bank Centre.

From 1962 onwards, Frank Bowling began to think deeply about geometry as an architectonic principle in his paintings.

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, Frank 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, Frank 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.

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

The work Frank Bowling has made since 2010 is in many ways a summation of his earlier concerns.

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

Frank Bowling's first award was a bursary from the Royal College of Art.

Frank Bowling graduated in 1962 with a silver medal for painting.

In 2005, Frank Bowling was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Frank Bowling 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.

Frank Bowling was elected a Senior Royal Academician on 1 October 2011.

Frank Bowling was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours.

Frank Bowling was knighted in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to art.

Frank Bowling was awarded the 2022 Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft fur Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig.