Biography from Spanierman Gallery:
| Born in British Guyana, Frank Bowling belongs to the generation of
British artists that came of age in the sixties. After graduating
from the Royal College of Art in 1962, along with David Hockney and R.
B. Kitaj, he, like Hockney, found his artistic identity in America.
Unlike Hockney’s, however, Bowling’s art is rooted in abstraction owing
to the abstract expressionist tradition of Mark Rothko.
Vigorously dripping and pouring paint in lustrous accretions, he
creates texturally complex paintings in which he plays with structure
through collaged and brightly painted shapes. He was elected in
2005 as the first black member of England’s Royal Academy.
Bowling
moved in 1950 to England, where he fulfilled his National Service
obligation by serving in the Royal Air Force. Turning at first to
poetry and art, he then attended a number of English art schools,
including the Royal College of Art, to which he won a
scholarship. He wrote a thesis on Piet Mondrian at the college,
which later led to his improvisations on Fibonacci postulations in his
work. On his graduation in 1962, he was awarded the Silver Medal
in Painting and a traveling scholarship to South America and the
Caribbean.
Although he occasionally created sculpture, Bowling
began his career as a painter of expressionist figural works that
accessed trans-cultural traditions and social and political
narratives. He developed a more geometric conception of space in
the mid-1960s, encompassing traditions of Western painting, such as the
axioms of Mondrian and J. Hambidge’s Elements of Dynamic Symmetry. His Big Bird (1965) won the Grand Prize for Contemporary Arts at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held at Dakar, Senegal, in 1965.
Bowling,
who had first visited New York City in 1961, established residence in
the city in 1966. It was at that time that he turned to
abstraction as a way of liberating his paintings from overt messages
and to explore pure pictorial concerns within the framework of Color
Field painting. Increasing the size of his canvases, he began to
paint works pinned to the wall or set on the floor of his studio.
He also turned to oil for its subtlety, rather than relying on the
water-based acrylics he had used earlier. By the 1970s color
became his main concern, and he replaced the earthy tones of his
earlier works with high-key hues set within animated, fluid
surfaces. In 1971 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
held a one-person exhibition of Bowling’s work, featuring six of his
large canvases measuring nine by twenty-two feet. Critic Robert
Doty called these works “a culmination of his search with ‘maps.’”
Bowling met the noted critic Clement Greenberg in the same year, and
Greenberg gave Bowling advice over many years, encouraging his
commitment to modernism.
In the mid-1970s Bowling began to
create smaller works, which had a more spontaneous effulgence. In
works of the 1980s he created surfaces that were harder worked and in
which he attached chunks of Styrofoam with serrated edges infused with
paint in geometric formations. This work was observed by The New York Times
critic Vivien Raynor to be a cross between African fetish and the
dribbled images of Jackson Pollock. Bowling has continued to push
his exploration of collaged and painted shapes, thickly globbed
pigments and lyrically moving passages of color, at times evincing a
geometric underpinning and at others breaking free from a structural
framework. In 1987 the Tate Gallery in London purchased Bowling’s
Spread Out Ron Kitaj, which was the first work by a living black British artist ever to be acquired by the museum.
In
addition to painting, Bowling has been active as a writer on art.
From 1969 to 1972 he worked as a contributing editor to Arts
magazine, in which he wrote reviews of exhibitions in New York and
London. He also wrote a series of essays on modernism and the
contributions of black artists.
Bowling has played a role in
many institutions in America and abroad, including the University of
Reading; Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London; Maidstone
College of Art, Kent; Kingston School of Art, Surrey; The Byam Shaw,
London; the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, New York;
Columbia University, New York; Rutgers University, New Jersey; the
School of Visual Arts, New York; and Mass Art, Boston. The artist
has received numerous awards and fellowships including two Guggenheim
fellowships, in 1967 and 1973. Bowling has had numerous solo
exhibitions at galleries, museums, and art centers in London and New
York, as well as in other cities in Europe.
Bowling’s work is
represented in major public collections around the world including the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool,
England; Lloyds of London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; the
Menil Foundation, Houston, Texas; the New Jersey Museum of Art,
Trenton; the Currier Gallery, Manchester, New Hampshire; the Phillips
Museum of Art, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania;
Guyana National Collection, Castellani House, Georgetown, Guyana; the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; the Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing;
the Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, Purchase; Rhode
Island School of Design, Providence; Royal College of Art, London;
University of Liverpool; University of Delaware; Royal Academy of Arts,
London; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, West Indies.
Bowling currently splits his time between London and New York.
©
The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery, LLC and is
copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery, LLC, and may not be reproduced in
whole or in part without written permission from Spanierman Gallery,
LLC, nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given
to Spanierman Gallery, LLC. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Frank Bowling is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Black American Artists
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