“The possibilities of paint are never-ending.”
—Frank Bowling

Abstracting through accumulation, its surface treated by diluting, dripping, and staining luminous washes of paint, Recovering Thanks to My Swedish Friends demonstrates the virtuosity and effervescence of Frank Bowling’s mature practice. Smoldering with rich yellows, deeper oranges and fluorescent green and pinks, the present work epitomises the intimate investigations of materiality that have been the sustained focus of Bowling’s incredible seven-decade career, allowing him to explore sensation, light, and materiality with dramatic effect. 

 

Bowling’s uncompromising experimentation with paint was evident from the onset of his career. The son of a policeman and a mother who sold textiles, Bowling moved to England at nineteen to pursue the latter, explaining: ‘I was a salesman selling lengths of cloth - I had a huckster’s licence’.ⁱ  An unequivocal creative influence, Bowling’s mother was only able to pay one term of art college. Living between people’s floors, by chance the sponsorship of fellow artist Roger de Grey allowed Bowling to find more permanent housing, subsequently securing a scholarship at the Royal College of Art. Recognised as an exceptional student of paint, Bowling graduated with a silver medal to David Hockney’s gold in 1962.

 

First visiting New York in 1961 on a travelling scholarship with Billy Apple and Hockney while still at the Royal College, the freedom of expression and ebullient energy propelled Bowling to relocate across the Atlantic in 1966, a city that Bowling continued to split his time between until 2018. New York was a revelation, the artist recalling the way that it ‘called to me, and its toughness, competitive edge, and excitement drove me and my work to new heights.’ⁱⁱ As Clement Greenberg had anticipated in conversation with Bowling that 'in America, there is no no-go area for anybody’, the artist began to experiment with the possibilities of paint, moving away from his more representational work.ⁱⁱⁱ Commencing his lauded ‘Map paintings’ that investigated Black cultural experience and later his pioneering ‘Poured paintings’, by 1971 Bowling was awarded his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art.

 

Developing his early practice, Recovering Thanks to My Swedish Friends explores the potential of light and material through paint. Dedicated to his ‘Swedish friends’, Bowling celebrates the Spritmuseum team who had supported Bowling during his illness before travelling to his exhibition Traingone in Stockholm from 2014 to 2015. Creating texture and form by layering foil and acrylic, Bowling first incorporated found materials in his canvases from the 1980s after discovering Rachel Scott’s car keys accidentally adhered to his work. Combining Mark Rothko’s highly active painterly surfaces with the ferocity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Bowling conveys emotional intensity through colour, reflecting on chance encounters and the atmospheres of his studio. For Bowling’s feathered edges, the artist sews, staples and glues different sections of canvas, a collaged effect that bestows his monumental canvases a fragility and ephemerality. While working in London and New York in studios next to the river, Bowling’s parallel study of Turner and Constable during his student years reveals the artist’s ambition to paint light as experience: principles potently demonstrated in Recovering Thanks to My Swedish Friends. 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Celebrating his 90th birthday this year, the Guyana-born British artist Frank Bowling has perpetually committed his career to the dramatic brilliance and potential of paint. 
• The first Black artist to be elected to the Royal Academy in 2005, Bowling was awarded the OBE for Services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2020. 
• Bowling’s work is found in many significant public and private collections including, among many others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; the Tate, London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

 

 

 

ⁱ Frank Bowling, quoted in Karen Wright, ‘In the Studio: Frank Bowling’, The Independent, 15 November 2014. 
ⁱⁱ Frank Bowling, quoted in Caroline Harris, Alexxa Gotthardt, and Cristina Chan, ‘Mapping a Life in Paint: An Interview with Frank Bowling’,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 2023, online. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Frank Bowling, quoted in Louisa Buck, ‘Frank Bowling: ‘My art isn’t about politics, it’s about paint’, The Art Newspaper, 10 June 2021, online.