Frank Bowling

Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling, known as Frank Bowling, was born on 26 February 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana, now Guyana. He left in May 1953, aged 19, and travelled to London, where his first ambition was to be a poet and writer. After two years of national service in the Royal Air Force, he turned to painting and in 1959 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

At the Royal College, Bowling studied alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj and graduated in 1962 with the silver medal for painting. By the early 1960s he was an assured figure on the London art scene. In 1966 he moved to New York, where his painting became increasingly abstract, and where for many years he lived and worked between New York and London.

In the late 1960s he made his Map Paintings, from about 1967 to 1971, in which stencilled outlines of continents float in fields of colour. Working with unstretched canvases placed on the floor and on the wall, Bowling used them to reject the Western-centred view of the world map. In the 1970s he developed his poured paintings, tilting the canvas and pouring acrylic paint across it, and later his Thames paintings.

Returning to London in 1975, he was for years overlooked by the British art establishment, and the first painting by him entered the Tate collection only in 1987. A turning point came in 2003 when the Map Paintings, unseen since the early 1970s, were shown at the Venice Biennale. In 2005 he became the first Black artist elected a Royal Academician, and in 2011 he became a Senior Royal Academician.

He was appointed OBE in 2008 and knighted in 2020. In 2019, at 85, he had a major retrospective at Tate Britain, The Possibilities of Paint Are Never-Ending, and his work is in more than fifty collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Tate and the Royal Academy. He has said that his identity as a British artist has always been crucial to him, and he still paints every day.