Frank Bowling

Born 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana (now Guyana)
Lives and works in London, England

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Australia to Africa 1971
acrylic and spray-paint on canvas
Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Hauser & Wirth
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Part of Frank Bowling’s seminal series Map paintings from the late 1960s, Australia to Africa merges postcolonial geopolitics with abstraction. Having left his home in British Guiana, Bowling arrived in London at the age of 19. He later studied at the Royal College of Art, having initially been rejected for lacking experience in life drawing. Ironically, Bowling would become the first Black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, in 2005, and the first Black British artist in the Tate collection.

From 1966, Bowling spent a decade in New York, where he began experimenting with the innovative painting techniques that now define his career. Layering canvases with stained or washed colours so they appear flooded with light, Bowling creates luminous, evanescent cartographies. Continents in his Map paintings appear floating rather than fixed, in this way rejecting Western-centric mapping. In Australia to Africa, the southern hemisphere assumes a central position, while the faint impression of Australia can be seen repeated, and adrift, in a sea of gold.

Drawing on his own Afro-Carribean roots, Bowling imbues what first appears abstract with a sense of geography and change. Rather than leading somewhere physical, his maps are dreamlike spaces for the imagination to roam.

Frank Bowling, (born British Guyana in 1934) has relentlessly pursued a practice which boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. Bowling moved to London in 1953, where he was recognised as an original force with a style combining figurative, symbolic and abstract elements. After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling’s commitment to abstract painting meant he was increasingly focused on material, process and colour, as seen in his ‘Map’ and ‘Poured’ paintings. Having returned to London in 1975, his recent work encompasses collage, poured paint, stencilling, staining, and stitching canvases, bringing together techniques honed over a lifetime of painting.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.