Nile Geese
1974
Acrylic on canvas

Frank Bowling (b. 1934) was born in the riverside town of Bartica, in North-Central Guyana, the son of a police district paymaster and a dressmaker. At the age of 19, he moved to London, interested in pursuing a career in the arts. Influenced by Rembrandt and Goya, Bowling’s early work was representational, figurative and narrative. Excluded from a number of exhibitions in London, because of his skin color, in 1966, Bowling relocated to New York, where he experienced an artistic epiphany and his career took off—he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, and had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

Abstraction was slowly creeping into Bowling’s work, but he felt uncertain about aligning himself with a tradition that had almost exclusively been the preserve of Caucasian men. However, the critic and abstraction-evangelist Clement Greenberg encouraged him, saying, “In America, there is no no-go area for anybody.” By the early 1970s, figuration was gone from his work and Bowling had devoted himself to exploring his materials and experimenting with color and process.