”Colour is about feeling, right?”
We have visited Frank Bowling, one of the most fascinating painters of our time, who, at age 91, still works in his studio every day.
”I still want to do it because it’s not easy to do. You know, I feel tired sometimes, but mostly I feel fine. I want to get here and get things done. This magic thing of making me feel that I’m doing something worthwhile, that I’m not wasting my time, that I’m actually catching up on some of the things that I’ve always wanted to do.”
Bowling both reflects upon his painting process, his intense interest in water and color, but also, looking back, how his biography shapes his practice:
”As a child, I was always covered in mud. I was trying to learn how to swim without anyone teaching me. Almost always, I would be caught out by my parents being muddy. And today, I’m enchanted by the fact of the sunny day next to the muddy. I use hot color for that reason. I’m searching for the ideal color that falls between those two concepts. A lot of my work has to do with walking through from light to dark.”
”It works in precisely the same way every time. I am throwing one color into the other. The changes that they make – some of them attract you immediately, some of them get you sour because they’re going to change again very soon, and lead into darkness. Often, I would like to keep the light on. All the time, I’m trying to make this kind of painting that no one else will be able to do.”
Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA was born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934 and 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 recognized as an original force in London’s art scene, with a style combining figurative, symbolic, and collaged elements. After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling committed to modernism through a conscious turn to abstraction. An increasing focus on material, process, and colour is evident in Bowling’s ‘Map’, ‘Pour’, and ‘Zipper’ paintings. In 2005, Bowling was elected as a Royal Academician. He received a Knighthood in 2020 and was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2022.
Today, Bowling’s mastery of the painted medium and explorations of light, colour, and geometry incorporate the use of multilayered washes. His restless reinvention of the painted plane endures in his current bodies of work, which continue to break new ground through his use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas, and metallic and pearlescent pigments. Bowling works every day in his studio, forever driven by his fascination with exploring the vast and radiant possibilities of paint.
Bowling’s work is represented in over fifty public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This year, an online interactive catalogue resource, Mapping Frank Bowling, was launched as an initiative by the artist’s studio to present Bowling’s works in museums and public institutions worldwide. Recent significant solo presentations include the touring exhibition Mappa Mundi, curated by Okwui Enwezor (2017-19), a major retrospective at Tate Britain (2019), and Frank Bowling’s Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2022-3), which travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Frank Bowling was filmed and interviewed on multiple occasions during November 2024 and June 2025. The interviews took place in his studio in London, Great Britain, and were conducted by Marc-Christoph Wagner. The featured exhibition in the video was Frank Bowling. Collage at Hauser & Wirth in Paris in the spring of 2025.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan and Simon Weyhe
Additional Footage: Astrid Agnes Hald
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025
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