Frank Bowling

Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling OBE RA (né Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934),^[1] known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana. He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction. Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters",^[2] as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools"^[3] and as a "modern master".^[2] British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or “wave” of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.^[4]

In 2019, 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.^[5] He is represented in more than fifty international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Tate Britain (London) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London).

Bowling studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art^[6] and, later, the City and Guilds of London Art School. In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, where he joined fellow students David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Patrick Caulfield.