Frank Bowling

Skip to main content
Collections Menu
Image Not Available for Frank Bowling
Frank Bowling
Image Not Available for Frank Bowling

Frank Bowling

Guyana-born British, born 1936
BiographyFrank Bowling, OBE RA, was born in Bartica and subsequently moved to London, where he attended the Royal College of Art. For years he has moved between London and New York, where he was also a prominent art critic, maintaining studios in both cities. Bowling’s Map Paintings are a series of large-scale abstractions that use the saturated paint technique associated with the Color Field school and feature sweeping passages of intense color overlaid with images of continental maps. In 2005, Bowling became the first black artist to be elected to England's Royal Academy of Art; in 2017, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Haus der Kunst, Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi.

“When you understand the materiality of an object or the things that you’re working with, you’re able to extract something that maybe you couldn’t quite anticipate. . . . I am drawn toward taking a hat or a grimy, grungy T-shirt and setting the stage for someone to really look at that thing. I want the viewer to consider what the object is at its essence, . . ., I want to give time and space to this thing in a different way.”
Person TypeIndividual