Off the wall: How Frank Bowling painted his way to prominence

At 91 years old, Frank Bowling is still finding new ways to let paint run its course. “I’m always following my instincts,” says Bowling, who has painted, poured, sprayed, stained and stitched vivid colours onto unprimed canvases for more than 70 years. “There was a time when I didn’t have a dealer and museums weren’t buying,” he says. “Now, my paintings are in more than 70 museums around the world.” Last year his works went on show at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo – a full-circle moment for the South America-born artist in the bright throes of his twilight years.

Now the London-based artist is set for another milestone: his first solo exhibition in Asia. Hauser & Wirth’s Frank Bowling: Like Water opens on 11 June in Hong Kong. But for a more intimate experience, make your way to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime brings together a collection of 11 artworks spanning the Guyanese-British artist’s long career. Unlike the major shows that he is now used to, the cosy gallery compresses Bowling’s bright colours until they detonate.

The exhibition moves like a swift and confident brushstroke through his oeuvre: the early expressionist phase, a piece or two from his transitional period in the mid-1960s and a pair of “poured” paintings from 1976, produced after the artist moved to New York. It was this shift of perspective that led Bowling to the abstraction that would make his name. There are even two more recent works that are being shown for the first time, “Swan Upping” (2020) and “Yellow Map” (2025). 

Each of Bowling’s poured paintings begins on the floor. Every cotton-duck canvas receives its first colours in the form of drips of paint that fall from an earlier in-progress painting hanging above – a sort of artistic assembly line. “Then my assistant fills a bucket with paint and water and pours it down the canvas while I direct the flood,” he says.

When Monocle visits his studio in South London, Bowling is directing his son, Ben – who’s armed with silver glitter-laced spray paint – from a wheelchair. “Brighter,” says Bowling of a long white streak that cuts down the canvas like a coastline, “all the way.” When Ben reaches a patch of empty space, Bowling reacts instinctively. “Put red in it,” he says. But the painting is still not finished. Later it will appear “on the ceiling of my room.” Bowling’s imagination never rests. “I’m preoccupied with the search for something new in painting so I’m always working in different ways.” 

Even in his nineties, Bowling is still letting paint find its path of least resistance. Age might have hindered his movement but his imagination hasn’t wearied. “I catch youthfulness from the people around me,” says Bowling. Many of whom are family members – studio assistants and collaborators – who replenish the current of curiosity that traces back to Bowling’s childhood spent helping his mother with her sewing business in New Amsterdam. “It’s absolutely a family affair. Many years ago I told the Royal Academy that I wanted my studio to become something like a laboratory and I’m really pleased about how that has worked out.” 

Bowling still shows up to his laboratory at the same time each day. There he sits, watching how the paint pools, how it “spreads and bleeds”. “You never know what you’ll find the next morning after the paint dries overnight.” 

‘Frank Bowling: Like Water’ opens on 11 June and runs until 29 August 2026.
‘Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime’ runs until January 2027.

Further reading:
– The art of ageing: Inside the studios of seven in-demand artists in their eighties and nineties