Frank Bowling

Throughout a career touching eight decades—from the 1950s to the present day—Frank Bowling (born 1934) has obsessively inquired into the materiality of paint. Focusing on a selection of eight monumental works made in his London studio during and after 2020, Frank Bowling: Penumbral Light offers new insight into the 88-year-old artist’s creative practice. With a foreword by the artist’s son, Ben Bowling, and an essay-conversation by curator Gemma Brace, this publication grants readers access into a vibrant creative world made of water, color, transparency, surface, movement and light.

“Modernism belonged to me also.” So resolved the British Guiana–born artist Frank Bowling in 1966, when he moved from his temporary home base of London to New York City, keen to make his mark on modern painting. This volume surveys for the first time the transformative years that Bowling spent in the US from 1966 through 1975, a chapter of extraordinary productivity and artistic growth that would greatly shape his thinking and practice.
Bowling’s relocation to New York brought him into contact with an art scene in flux, with abstract painting on the rise and vigorous debates unfolding around Black cultural identity and artistic practice. Bowling participated in this scene in broad and deep ways, from his unique vantage point as an emigre twice over: exhibiting widely, writing for art magazines, engaging peers in dialogue and, in 1969, organizing 5+1, an exhibition of five leading African American abstract artists plus himself. During these years, his own work explored the tension between representational imagery and fields of color, ultimately moving toward full abstraction.
Frank Bowling’s Americas assembles more than 30 paintings—many rarely seen—from this critical period, and places them in the context of both Bowling’s own artistic trajectory and the New York art scene at a time of aesthetic and racial reckoning. Offering magnificent reproductions of these vibrant, multifaceted works, accompanied by curatorial essays and statements by contemporary artists, this book invites new understanding of an artist whose work has remained always in motion.
Born in British Guiana in 1934, Frank Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognized as an original force in London’s art scene. After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling shifted away from figurative imagery. He returned to London in 1975 but continued to spend significant periods in New York. Bowling was awarded a knighthood in 2020. He is the subject of a BBC documentary, Frank Bowling's Abstract World.

This is the first publication to examine Frank Bowling’s (born 1934) art and ideas in relation to sculpture. An extended essay by Sam Cornish charts his interactions with sculpture since the 1960s, beginning with his shaped canvas Swan (1964), which was first displayed with ribbons and an anchor hanging from it. The text also considers Bowling’s time in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was involved with debates around Black art and the work of a number of African American sculptors.
The book asks how Bowling’s sculpture extends our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship also highlights the importance of sculpture to high modernism, from which Bowling’s mature art emerged. Bowling is one of a number of high modernist painters—including Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler—who also made sculpture, complicating perceptions of high modernism as a tendency associated primarily with painting.

A survey of Frank Bowling’s (born 1936) abstract painting practice of the last 50 years, Frank Bowling: London / New York is published on the occasion of concurrent exhibitions by the artist at Hauser & Wirth New York and Hauser & Wirth London in summer 2021. Bowling’s transatlantic practice in his New York and London studios traces his physical and artistic journeys and his continual reinvention of abstraction on the painted plane.
Rich in archival studio shots and with abundant plates of Bowling’s canvases, this publication also includes an essay by Mark Godfrey and a conversation between Bowling, his wife, artist Rachel Scott, and his son Ben Bowling, offering the reader an intimate insight into the master painter’s creative process.

Over the past decade, Frank Bowling (born 1934) has enjoyed belated attention and celebration, including a major Tate Britain retrospective in 2019. This comprehensive monograph, published in 2011, is now available in an updated and expanded edition. Born in British Guiana, Bowling arrived in England in his late teens, going on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Derek Boshier. By the early 1960s he was recognized as an original force in the vibrant London art scene, with a style that brilliantly combined figurative, symbolic and abstract elements.

Dividing his time between New York and London since the late 1960s, Bowling has developed a unique and virtuosic abstract style that combines aspects of American painterly abstraction with a treatment of light and space that consciously recollects the great English landscape painters Gainsborough, Turner and Constable.