Frank Bowling valuation

Frank Bowling was born in Bartica, British Guiana, in 1934 and spent most of his childhood in New Amsterdam. He came to London in 1953 and studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art and the City and Guilds of London Art School before a scholarship took him to the Royal College of Art in 1959, where his fellow students included David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. From the mid-1960s, working in New York, he made the Map paintings, projecting the outlines of continents onto large canvases, and these formed his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. He argued for abstraction as a real possibility for Black artists, and by early 1972 his canvases had left motif and symbol behind; in 1975 he built an apparatus to tilt the canvas and began his poured paintings. In 2005 he became the first Black artist elected a Royal Academician, and Tate Britain held a retrospective in 2019. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate.

His paintings are in acrylic on canvas, often very large, with stained, poured and thickly built-up paint, and from the 1980s acrylic gel and foam. Check heavy paint for cracking, flaking and dirt. A buyer will want the title, the date and the gallery invoice.