Frank Bowling

Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling OBE RA (born 26 February 1934, Bartica, British Guiana),[1] known as Frank Bowling, is a Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. He 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] He is the first Black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.[4]

Sir

Frank Bowling

OBE RA
Born
Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling

(1934-02-26) 26 February 1934
Bartica, Guyana, South America
NationalityBritish
Alma materChelsea School of Art;
Royal College of Art
MovementAbstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction
Websitefrankbowling.com

Biography

Early years

Bowling was born in Bartica, Guyana,[5] to Richard Bowling, a police district paymaster, and his wife Agatha, a seamstress,[4] dressmaker and milliner.[6] In 1953, at age 19, Bowling emigrated to Britain,[7] where he lived with an uncle and completed his education.

After doing his National Service in the Royal Air Force, Bowling went on to study art, despite earlier ambitions to be a poet and a writer.[8] He studied at the Chelsea School of Art, then in 1959 won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art,[5] where fellow students included artists such as David Hockney,[9] Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. At graduation in 1962, Hockney was awarded the gold medal while Bowling was given the silver.[5][9] Bowling had been tipped to win the gold but due to his controversial 1960 marriage to Royal College Registrar Paddy Kitchen (controversial because Kitchen was a staff member; relationships were banned between staff and students),[10] he was relegated to silver. His first one-person exhibition, entitled Image in Revolt, was held in London in 1962 at the Grabowski Gallery,[8] and other exhibitions followed. However, Bowling was frustrated at being pigeonholed as a Caribbean artist; as he said in a 2012 Guardian interview with Laura Barnett: "It seemed that everyone was expecting me to paint some kind of protest art out of postcolonial discussion. For a while I fell for it. I painted a picture called the Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba."[9]

1960s–present

A move to New York in the mid-1960s exposed Bowling to his American contemporaries and soon won him a place in the 1971 Whitney Biennial. As Maya Jaggi writes: "unlike contemporaries who founded British pop art, Bowling took a singular path, from Bacon-esque figurative painting to an abstract art touched by personal memory and history.... Encouraged by the US critic Clement Greenberg, he found a freedom in abstract art, alongside Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman."[4] Between 1969 and 1972 Bowling was a contributing editor of Arts Magazine.

Bowling now spends part of each year between London and New York, where he maintains studios.[11]

Exhibitions and collections

Bowling's paintings have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States and are included in major private and corporate collections worldwide.[12] His work can also be seen in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art[13] and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Tate Gallery in London.[14]

In 2017, there was a retrospective of his work at Haus der Kunst in Munich.[15] A major retrospective exhibition of his work was on view at Tate Britain in 2019.[16][17][18] Land of Many Waters, a major exhibition of unseen works by Bowling, alongside key paintings from the previous decade, was exhibited at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2021.[2] In 2022, the Stephen Lawrence Gallery at the University of Greenwich focused on his sculptures and the sculptural aspects of his paintings in an exhibition called Frank Bowling and sculpture.[19] his exhibition Frank Bowling's Americas is at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 22 October 2022 to 9 April 2023 and will be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from 13 May to 10 September 2023.[20]

Critical assessment

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] Writing for Art Basel, the art curator Sam Cornish said: "Central to Bowling’s art is an astonishing aliveness to the mutability of color, as hue and material, combined with a flair for accumulating granular visual detail into dramatic, large-scale panoramas".[7]

Awards and honours

Bowling has received two Guggenheim Fellowships.[4][21]

In 1965 at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal, Bowling's painting "Big Bird" won the Grand Prize for Contemporary Arts.[8]

On 26 May 2005 Bowling was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.[22] He 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.[4] He was elected a Senior Royal Academician on 1 October 2011.[22]

In 2008 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours.[23] He was knighted in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to art.[24][25]

Family life

Bowling is married to textile artist Rachel Scott.[11][26][16]

While working at the Royal College of Art he met the novelist, biographer and art critic Paddy Kitchen when she was a member of staff there. They married in 1960 (divorcing later in the 1960s) and had one son, who is now deceased: Richard Sheridan Bowling (1962–2001), known as Dan Bowling.[27][10]

Frank Bowling has two other sons: Ben Bowling (born 1962), Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at King's College London, whose mother is the artist Claire Spencer; and Sacha Bowling, a film maker and photographer,[4] whose mother is Irene Delderfield Bowling.

References
  1. Tate. "Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA born 1934". Tate. Retrieved 20 January 2023.
  2. "Frank Bowling: Land of Many Waters". Arnolfini. 2021. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  3. "Frank Bowling (1936-), Artist". National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  4. Jaggi, Maya (24 February 2007). "The weight of colour". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  5. Barnard, Imelda (June 2017). "My life has always been about painting". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  6. Tate. "Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA born 1934". Tate. Retrieved 20 January 2023.
  7. Cornish, Sam. "Frank Bowling: A master abstractionist at last gets his due". Art Basel. Retrieved 27 January 2022.
  8. Richards, Spencer A., Frank Bowling biography. Archived 22 July 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
  9. Barnett, Laura (2 July 2012). "Frank Bowling and the politics of abstract painting". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  10. Collins, Ian (12 December 2005). "Obituary: Paddy Kitchen". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  11. "Spencer Richards in conversation with John Bunker". Instantloveland. 22 September 2018. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  12. "Frank Bowling CV.pdf". Google Docs.
  13. "Night Journey". metmuseum.org. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  14. "'Who's Afraid of Barney Newman', Frank Bowling, 1968". Tate. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  15. "Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi". Haus der Kunst. Retrieved 19 September 2018.
  16. Fullerton, Elizabeth (30 April 2021). "Frank Bowling's New Paintings Are Family Affairs". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2023.
  17. "Tate Britain exhibition: Frank Bowling". Tate. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  18. Jones, Jonathan (30 May 2019). "Apocalyptic visions from a shunned giant of British art – Frank Bowling review". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  19. "Frank Bowling and Sculpture". University of Greenwich Galleries. 2022. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  20. "Frank Bowling's Americas". Museum of Fine Arts Boston. 2022. Retrieved 27 January 2023.
  21. Frank Bowling Archived 2 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine at InIVA.
  22. Frank Bowling RA, Royal Academy of Arts.
  23. "No. 58729". The London Gazette (Supplement). 14 June 2008. p. 9.
  24. Davies, Caroline; Murphy, Simon (9 October 2020). "Runners and writers: who got what in the birthday honours list". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 January 2023. The abstract expressionist artist Frank Bowling said he was "extremely proud" to be made a knight at the age of 86. The Guyana-born artist still works in his studio almost every day.
  25. "No. 63135". The London Gazette (Supplement). 10 October 2020. p. B2.
  26. "Rachel Scott". Toast Magazine. 30 June 2021. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  27. Jungr, Barb (19 August 2019). "My Favourite Painting". Country Life. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.