Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA is 91 years old and still painting. Born in Bartica, Guyana, he has spent the better part of seven decades moving between London, New York and the spaces in between, building a body of work that sits at the centre of transatlantic abstraction without ever quite belonging to either side of the Atlantic in the way critics sometimes want it to. The Foundation that now bears his name launches formally on 24 June 2026 as a registered charity. It is long overdue.
Established as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in 2024, the Frank Bowling Foundation has received a substantial gift from the artist himself: paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and an archive covering his life and career in considerable depth. That material will underpin a programme of exhibitions, loans, research and publications, both in the UK and internationally. The stated aims are access, scholarship, and cultural relevance for future generations. Those are the right aims.
The launch coincides with the Foundation’s first public initiative, Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw, which opens at the Royal Drawing School on 25 June and runs until 22 August 2026. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the School and focuses on drawing, a dimension of Bowling’s practice that tends to receive less attention than the large, poured and layered paintings for which he is best known. That’s precisely why it’s worth examining. The creative process in Bowling’s work is not always legible from the finished surfaces alone, and an exhibition centred on works on paper and the act of drawing offers a different kind of access to how the work actually comes into being.
Bowling has been critically underrecognised for much of his career, a situation that has been slowly correcting itself. The Tate retrospective in 2019 was a significant moment. The Foundation represents something more permanent, an institutional infrastructure for the work that doesn’t depend on the rhythms of the exhibition calendar or the enthusiasms of individual curators.
What the Foundation does with the archive will matter as much as what it does with the art. Bowling’s position within postwar British painting, his relationships with American abstraction, his thinking about colour and identity and geography, these are not fully written histories. There is real scholarly work to be done, and the archive exists to support it.
Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw opens at the Royal Drawing School on 25 June 2026.
“This charity will support a mission that has always been close to my heart – and which has never been more important,” said Frank Bowling. “There is a wealth of creative talent out there. We must empower people, especially children, to create.”
Professor Ben Bowling, Chair of the Foundation, said: “Sir Frank Bowling’s legacy lies not only in the remarkable body of work he has created over more than six decades, but in the generations of artists, students and audiences his work continues to inspire. The Foundation has been established to preserve and extend that legacy through education, research and public engagement for years to come.”
Susi Sahmland, Head of Education and Outreach at the Foundation, said: “At the heart of our work is a belief that art education should be open, exploratory and accessible to all. Through workshops, partnerships and outreach programmes, we hope to continue Frank Bowling’s longstanding commitment to nurturing creativity, curiosity and confidence in future generations.”
Harry Parker, Director of the Royal Drawing School, said: “Frank Bowling: Driven to Draw provides a unique insight into the lifelong drawing practice of one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists. We are deeply grateful to the Frank Bowling Foundation for making this level of access possible and for its commitment to education at every stage.”
The Foundation is led by trustees Ben Bowling (Chair), Sacha Bowling, Robert Craig and Pat Saro. Its international advisory board comprises Grace Aneiza Ali (writer, independent curator and professor); Elena Crippa (Curator of Contemporary Art, Courtauld); Marko Daniel (Director, Fundació Joan Miró); Ursula Davila-Villa (legacy advisor); Thomas J. Price (artist); and Nick Willing (Paula Rego Estate).
New Exhibition
Spanning more than sixty years, the exhibition, organised in close collaboration with Frank Bowling, brings together preparatory sketches and collages drawn from the artist’s archive, as well as completed works on paper and paintings. The show is divided into three main sections: early drawings made during Bowling’s years as an art student in the 1950s and 1960s; expanded drawings from Bowling’s practice from the mid-1960s onwards; and a series of recent works up to the present day, highlighting drawing as a space for exploration and discovery throughout the artist’s later career.
The exhibition runs from 25 June to 22 August 2026. Opening hours: Monday—Friday 10 am—5 pm, Saturday 10 am—4 pm