Curator Habda Rashid, on curating scale, sensation, and a transnational abstraction across seven decades.
20 March 2026
In ‘Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime‘, curator Habda Rashid brings a focused and intimate lens to one of the most expansive practices in contemporary painting. Spanning nearly seventy years, the exhibition resists the tendency toward monumental survey, instead drawing viewers into a closer encounter with Bowling’s material language-its fluid negotiations between control and chance, memory and abstraction. In this conversation with Suzette Bell-Roberts, Rashid reflects on shaping a curatorial narrative attuned to both the autobiographical undercurrents and formal innovations of Bowling’s work, while situating his practice within and beyond the histories of modernism, abstraction, and Black British art.
Yellow Map, 2025, Acrylic on canvas with marouflage, 161.5 x 107.3 x 4.5 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Anna Arca. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘ Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime‘ spans nearly seven decades of practice. How did you approach shaping a curatorial narrative that honours this expansive trajectory while remaining attentive to shifts in form, scale, and material experimentation?
Habda Rashid: Many of the exhibitions of Frank Bowling I have encountered, alongside visits to his studio, have tended to present the work at a monumental scale or in serial form. Yet, for me, an autobiographical and distinctly intimate register has always underpinned these presentations. References to family, his mother in particular, the landscape of Guyana, and the artist’s personal relationships and lived experiences permeate the work. This sense of proximity extends beyond the canvas to the studio itself, where familial structures shape its daily rhythms and operations.
This exhibition seeks to foreground that intimacy by adopting a more concentrated curatorial approach, one that enables connections to emerge across temporal and material shifts in the work. By bringing the works into closer dialogue, the presentation invites a more direct, one-to-one encounter with the paintings, opening a space in which Bowling’s painted “world” may be experienced as both personal and formal.
Swan Upping, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 114.3 x 96.5 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Sacha Bowling. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
The notion of the sublime carries philosophical, aesthetic, and political weight. How do you interpret this concept within Bowling’s practice, particularly in relation to his sustained engagement with colour and abstraction?
For Bowling, the relationship to what he has described as “the possibility of paint” operates as a central generative force within the work. This ongoing commitment to experimentation is not simply procedural but bound to a sustained inquiry into the sensorial and affective capacities of colour, as well as the material agency of paint itself. Within Bowling’s practice, paint enters a kind of dialogue, forming fluid associations that exceed fixed compositional logic.
His process might be understood as one of controlled spontaneity. Rather than imposing total authorial control, Bowling establishes a framework within which chance, gravity, viscosity and time actively participate in the making of the work. This oscillation between control and release, refined over decades of practice, locates the work within a register that approaches the sublime.
Here, the sublime emerges not through representation but through process: in the moment where material exceeds intention, yet remains held within a coherent, perceptual field. What unfolds is neither purely accidental nor entirely determined, but a negotiation between artist and medium. Bowling produces surfaces that resonate on a deeply sensory level, thus inviting viewers into an encounter that is at once immersive, unstable and profoundly felt.
Swan Geometric Observation 1, 1965, Oil medium, pen, and pastel on paper, 57.1 x 40 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Anna Arca. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
Bowling’s journey from Guyana to London and New York has often framed readings of his work. How did you balance biographical context with a focus on the paintings as materially complex and formally ambitious objects?
Bowling locates a global narrative within his material and formal concerns, tracing a movement from figuration to geometric abstraction and subsequently, to colour field painting. These shifts are legible through the works themselves. In the presentation at the Fitzwilliam, this becomes particularly apparent through the proximity of works produced across different decades and geographies.
Motifs associated with Guyana remain present, whether in the evocation of his mother’s “Variety Store” or in the recurring engagement with water, tied to personal memory and reflected in titles such as ‘Leonoraseas’ (1976), named after a village along a major Guyanese waterway. However, such references are not positioned as fixed points of interpretation. Instead, the paintings themselves remain primary. While traces of place persist, the exhibition resists imposing a singular geographic or narrative framework, allowing meaning to emerge through the works’ formal, material, and perceptual experience.
Sentinel, 1976, Acrylic on canvas, 173.2 x 71.2 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Anna Arca. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025
The exhibition emphasises surface, layering, and the physicality of poured paint. How did you choreograph the gallery space to foreground the sensorial and immersive qualities of these works?
The octagonal architecture of the gallery provides a framework for establishing visual relationships across the space, encouraging a mode of viewing grounded in perception and sensory encounter. Within this context, two poured paintings from the mid-1970s are presented. These works articulate a distinct approach to abstraction, foregrounding process, material flow and the dynamics of colour.
At the same time, they remain in dialogue with the broader practice, with chromatic and formal resonances extending across the room. By reducing the number of works on display, each work is afforded the space necessary for sustained engagement, enabling moments of close study and a more attentive, embodied experience of the paintings.
Potarospray, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 116 x 81 x 5 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Jess Littlewood. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
In bringing together early figurative works with later abstract canvases, what dialogues emerge around continuity and rupture within Bowling’s visual language?
Numerous dialogues emerge across the works, connections that became more apparent even to us once the paintings were brought into relation within the space. Recurring gestures surface – thick linear marks, bold chromatic intensities and the repetition of tonal registers. Borders remain a focus, as does an evolving attention to the centre of the pictorial plane, whether in the figurative “beggar” and “swan” paintings of the 1960s, the poured works of the 1970s, or more recent map paintings produced as late as 2025. The exhibition seeks to draw out these correspondences while also tracing the developments within Bowling’s practice, allowing continuity and transformation to be experienced in tandem.
Pondlife (After Millais), 2007, acrylic, acrylic gel and found objects on canvas with marouflage, 239.5 x 135.8 x 4.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photographed by Damian Griffiths. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
The Fitzwilliam’s institutional context carries its own art historical lineage. How did you position Bowling’s work in conversation with broader histories of modernism and post-war abstraction?
It was important that Bowling’s relationship to historical painting could be meaningfully registered within the exhibition’s context. The siting of the show in the Octagon Gallery is significant in this regard, as visitors arrive there by passing through a sequence of historical collection galleries. Along this route, they encounter artists such as Titian, whose work has sustained Bowling’s interest and influence. This physical and visual progression creates an implicit dialogue between past and present, situating Bowling’s practice within a broader art historical continuum.
At the same time, contemporary art remains a relatively recent area of focus for the Fitzwilliam; my role marks the museum’s first dedicated curatorial position in this field. As such, I am particularly attentive to how these connections are articulated across the institution. The aim is not only to position contemporary work in relation to the historical collection but to enable audiences to encounter it with greater clarity and depth, foregrounding points of resonance, while allowing the specificity of Bowling’s practice to remain distinct.
Lenoraseas, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 223 x 118 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Charlie Littlewood. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
Your curatorial research often addresses postcolonial entanglements and expanded narratives of art history. How does ‘Seeking the Sublime’contribute to reframing conversations around Black British modernism?
Bowling can be understood as one of Britain’s first truly global artists. His practice resists fixed geographic or cultural positioning, instead operating across multiple contexts to produce a body of work that both engages with and pushes beyond established histories of style. In doing so, Bowling does not simply participate in modernism but actively expands its terms, embedding within it a set of cross-cultural readings that challenge singular, Eurocentric frameworks.
Rather than framing this exhibition through the language of “entanglement,” often used to describe transnational practices, the approach here takes its lead from Bowling’s own position. The emphasis is less on mapping influence and more on recognising how his work contributes to an expanded canon and one that calls for a rethinking of the epistemological frameworks through which modernism, and abstraction in particular, are understood.
This perspective is further articulated through the placement of Bowling’s work within the Museum’s collection galleries. Here, one of his paintings is shown in dialogue with a work by Aubrey Williams. While both artists share connections to Britain and to the language of Abstract Expressionism, their practices remain distinctly their own. Presented in proximity, their works open up a broader, more nuanced reading of abstraction, one that acknowledges difference, multiplicity, and the expansion of modernist discourse beyond its conventional boundaries.
4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1961, oil on linen, 221 x 170 cm. Courtesy the artist. Photographed by Stan Narten. © Frank Bowling. All rights reserved, DACS 2025.
At a moment when abstraction is being critically revisited, what do you hope audiences take away from this focused presentation of Bowling’s enduring and evolving pursuit of the sublime?
For audiences, a key aim of this presentation is to reconsider the canon of abstraction through a more expansive, cross-cultural lens. By foregrounding practices that operate across geographies and histories, abstraction is no longer encountered as a singular, Euro-American trajectory, but as a transnational, historically layered ontology, shaped by multiple voices, movements and lived experiences.
Within this framework, Bowling emerges not only as a central figure but also as an artist whose work fundamentally reshapes how abstraction is understood. The exhibition invites viewers to recognise his rightful place among the UK’s most significant living artists, while also engaging with the singularity and complexity of his practice.
More broadly, the display advocates for a museum ecology in which contemporary art exists in active dialogue with historical and modern collections. By situating Bowling’s work within this continuum, audiences are encouraged to draw connections across time, question inherited art-historical narratives, and recognise the ongoing relevance and urgency of artists working today. In doing so, the museum becomes not only a site of preservation, but one of critical re-evaluation and expanded understanding.
The exhibition is on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, until the 17th of January 2027.
