Frank Bowling’s practice has drawn from color field painting and abstract expressionism. His prioritization of process and the properties of paint are central to his works. Combining abstraction, landscape, and cartography, Frank Bowling’s oeuvre is characterized by an experimental and spontaneous relationship with shape, color, and structure. Known for his continually evolving practice, Bowling began his career with more figurative painting before moving to pure abstraction in the 1970s and rooting his work in a convergence of techniques and styles evident in his work to this day.

“Blackness is no more expressed, in the literal sense, by painting a black face than by a black line,”¹ Frank Bowling wrote in 1970. There is no one symbol that represents the experience of Blackness more than another symbol. Abstraction is just as effective as figuration in Black meaning-making, perhaps in that neither is effective at all. The symbols in Bowling’s paintings are a collection of iconographic signifiers that the artist arranges in thematic series. Leaning on abstraction, Bowling creates compositional arrangements that remain opaque vestiges of land masses and shapes.

Born in South America, in Guyana, Bowling has spent his six-decade-plus career living between London and New York. The artist’s choice to represent the shapes of continents and islands reflects a stripping away of assumed relationships between color and identity, nation and personhood. Shapes that once seemed representative, such as continents and islands, are abstracted to reveal that even the illusion of the shape has a great bearing on the message extracted from the painting. For Bowling, “the subject of painting is paint,” the artist’s son, Ben Bowling, said in 2024.² The illusion of meaning has its foundation in the human eye’s perception of formal elements.

Committed to process, Bowling’s compositions also question the politics of cartography, a motif ubiquitous across his work. In the Map Paintings (1967-1971) series, the South American continent begins as a formal outline that ascribes to the cartographic borders, then becomes a remnant of a shape beyond cartography. The motif is abstracted as the continent becomes an amalgamation of rectangles, which later become vertical lines that stretch from the top of a painting down to the bottom. In abstractions that seem to depict horizons or landscapes, we find the motifs of continents and longitudinal lines seeming to appear again. The illusion of shape, horizon, atmosphere, border, and shore, however, is merely a trick of the eye.