Sir Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling OBE RA, known as Frank Bowling, is a writer and abstract painter whose move to London at age 19 set him on a path toward becoming a leading figure in British art. Bowling’s influences begin with his birthplace of Bartica, Guyana—the former colony British Guiana—and continued in his adulthood while working in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Early in his development, Bowling began stenciling and silk-screening images of the continents, Guyana, and his mother’s home into his artworks. Figuration soon gave way to abstraction with works like Polish Rebecca, 1971, in Glenstone’s collection, where thinned paints of deep purple, red, and rich green spread across the canvas, obscuring the stenciled outlines of Africa, Australia, and South America. This approach exemplifies Bowling’s practice of exploring the materiality of paint.

–Carly Davis, from the Glenstone Field Guide