When I enter his South London studio on an unusually bright March afternoon, Frank Bowling is smiling at a still wet canvas. “She’s cooking,” he lets out. Dehumidifiers hum as the paint congeals into curlicues. A broken paintbrush has been embedded into this palimpsest of a work. “A clue,” says the 91-year-old artist’s son, Ben, with a nod.
The painting will soon be transported across the channel to Paris, where it will make its debut at Hauser & Wirth in the 91-year-old artist’s first solo exhibition in France: “Collage.” For now though, we are hidden in Peacock Yard, a Victorian enclave of brick tenements and ornate terracotta arches in Elephant & Castle. Erected in 1886, it once contained dozens of workshops for blacksmiths, carpenters, joiners, tanners, printers, and wheelwrights. Today, it is a sanctuary for one of Britain’s most intrepid artists, where, he says, he gets on with the task of “loosening up what feels too tight.”
Bowling has worked here for over four decades, yet just a single painting hangs on the wall these days. Created between 1960 and 1962 and relegated to his archive for much of its life, it depicts the Bowling Variety Store in Bartica, Guyana, where the artist was born in 1934. Employing the masking tape techniques associated with New York’s color field generation, Untitled (Mother’s House in Landscape) is both an early marker of the artist’s shift from figurative painting to abstract expressionism and a portal into the complexities of his childhood.
“Frank had to grow up quick,” Ben explains. His first job was as a night watchman, guarding the construction site of the very building he would later immortalize in paint. Bowling’s mother, a devout Anglican, owned the store. Each Sunday, he remembers, “she would invite the beggars from the street into the house. My job was to wash their hands before they ate.”
With his mother’s blessing, Bowling took a boat across the Atlantic at the age of 19, arriving in London just after Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. His first foray into the art world was as a life model at the Royal College of Art, where he eventually enrolled himself, developing a portfolio in between blue collar jobs and enduring repeated rejections before one of the college’s teachers, the painter Carel Weight, spotted his unorthodox talent.
Bowling trained at the RCA alongside the likes of David Hockney, who by the 1960s would be well on his way to becoming a household name, yet he failed to find gallery representation in his adopted home for much of his career. “I lost sight of the British art scene because we were not looking for the same thing,” Bowling says, before recalling an artist peer telling him: “Blacks can sing and they can dance, but they don’t understand the wall and the floor.”
A move to New York in 1966, where the American civil rights movement was in full swing, would transform his practice—and put him on the art-world map. “I started out in London as an easel painter,” he remembers. “When I arrived in New York, I found a big loft on Broadway, so I moved to the floor.” In Soho, Bowling experimented with the physicality of paint—pouring, staining, and layering color with an audacity that would one day be regarded as his signature. His canvases from the period—silkscreened outlines of continents submerged beneath fields of pigment—explored coiled themes of colonization decades before they were of concern to the Western art world.
In the decades since, Bowling’s practice has never stalled, from the abstracted landscapes of the early '80s (by which time he had settled back in London) all the way to the color-drenched, mixed-media canvases cooking in his studio today. Recognition has come late—he was knighted as an octogenarian—but few now doubt Bowling’s impact on contemporary art. The Hauser & Wirth show, which opens March 22, is just the latest testament to a legacy that is being defined in real time. Charting his kinship with the art of collage, the exhibition excavates his magpie sensibility—Bowling has been known to incorporate what others might see as detritus into his canvases—and almost architectural approach to composition.
At the heart of this inspired body of work is the quotidian. “Frank paints every single day. Christmas Day, his birthday—always,” Ben says, “and he has never thrown anything away.” Today, Bowling’s Peacock Yard studio contains more than 10,000 such experiments, including letters, diaries, photographs, and sketches. Individually, they’re just clues, but as a whole they amount to a life in art that archivists will have the privilege of sifting through one day.
