Incandescent Colour

Frank Bowling is arguably Britain’s greatest living abstractionist. His colour field works are incandescent and shimmer with intensity, hope. Until recently, he has been largely overlooked and the prolific Bowling remained little-known outside of art world circles. But his public profile is now shining thanks in part to a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019, a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2020. “I’m looking for newness, something I’ve never seen before. I’m still trying to make the best painting the world has ever seen,” says Bowling who turns 91 this year.

Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling has spent the past 40 years criss-crossing the Atlantic. His Hauser & Wirth show brought together works from across his six-decade career that explore his stylistic shift from figuration and pop art to abstraction, as well as the influence of both London and New York on his creative vision. He was also met with new dilemmas as the Civil Rights Movement intensified in a city where divisions between the art of Black and white artists remained stark and socio-political issues continue to influence. He’s an ardent believer in the arts and in 2024 donated £500,000 worth of work to help buy art supplies for U.K. schools.

Bowling is hugely inventive in the materiality of paint notably his use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, metallic and pearlescent pigments turning his canvases into mesmerising compositions that literally glow. The legacies of the English landscape traditions of Gainsborough, Turner and Constable also ripple through his oeuvre. “The English landscape tradition is a rich view that I could keep ploughing,” he muses, “but I don’t want to make Constables. I want to make new works that have spirit and richness,” says the artist.