Frank Bowling (b. 1934)

CUPID’S ARROW, 1992
acrylic on canvas
16 x 48 inches
signed

Provenance: Skoto Gallery, NY, solo exhibition, 2003

Sir Frank Bowling, OBE RA was born in French Guyana in 1934 and moved to London nearly twenty years later.  He began his art education in 1958 at the City & Guilds of London Art School and the Royal College of Art in London.  He also spent a term in 1960 at the Slide School of Art.  By the mid-1960s, he was already enjoying successful exhibitions in the UK and in New York (Grabowski Gallery, London, 1962; Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, 1966).

He relocated to New York in 1966 and associated with artists such as Jasper Johns, Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards, Al Loving and Daniel Larue Johnson.  In 1969, he organized and showed in the 5 + 1 exhibition at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He had a solo exhibit at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, and was also included in the controversial, Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition there.  Throughout the 1970s he experimented with various forms of abstraction, from his Map Paintings to Poured Paintings.

Beginning in the 1980s and continuing, he increasingly began incorporating elements of collage, stencil, and stitching into his canvases.  

His work was included in these important recent exhibitions: