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Frank Bowling

BritishBritish
, b. 1934

Frank Bowling has been hailed as one of the finest British artists of his generation. Born in British Guiana in 1934, Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognised as an original force in London’s art scene with a style combining figurative, symbolic and abstract elements. Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005 and was awarded the OBE for services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2020. His work is represented in fifty collections worldwide and has been exhibited in 160 group and 100 solo exhibitions, including the 2017-19 touring exhibition, Mappa Mundi, and the hugely successful retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. Bowling is the subject of a BBC documentary, Frank Bowling's Abstract World, which coincided with the opening of the Tate Retrospective. At the age of 86, Bowling works every day in his South London studio, accompanied by his wife, Rachel, other family members and friends, forever driven by his fascination with pushing the vast and radiant possibilities of paint.