In the summer of 2019, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, under former director Neal Benezra, decided to use deaccession funds from the sale of a 1960 Mark Rothko painting for 11 acquisitions aimed at diversifying and filling in art historical gaps in the museum’s permanent collection. A standout among the new purchases was a massive color-drenched abstract canvas by Frank Bowling. Widely considered one of the foremost British painters of his generation, the Guyana-born artist is surprisingly lesser known here.

Now, “Elder Sun Benjamin,” painted in Bowling’s London studio in 2018, fills a massive wall in the final room of the resplendent SFMOMA exhibition, “Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975,” on view through Sept. 10. The 17-foot-wide abstract canvas is vibrant and richly textured, its bands of red, yellow and blue suggestive of a national flag. It is also, like much of the 89-year-old artist’s work, steeped in both historical, transnational memory and his own autobiography.

The painting’s playful title refers to the artist’s son, Ben Bowling, whose presence is hinted at in barely visible photographs — one of him as a boy, another as a grown man — embedded under thickly smeared, crackling yellow acrylic. It’s one of many works by Bowling that depict overtly, or subtly in their titles, his ties to family. Bowling’s memories of his mother, once the proprietor of a Guyanese variety store, loom large in a significant 1960s series he created before embracing abstraction.

“一个是很难认为其他男性painters who bring their children into their work in a parallel fashion, as elements in a complex dialogue about identity,” writes SFMOMA’s painting and sculpture curator Sarah Roberts in the exhibition’s accompanying catalog.

Ben Bowling, who still meets his father in his London studio several times each week, visited San Francisco from London for the SFMOMA opening in May. Standing in front of his namesake painting, Bowling told The Chronicle that his dad’s formidable art practice, which has received heightened attention from institutions and collectors in recent years (Bowling had his first career retrospective at the Tate Britain in 2019 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020; he currently has a solo exhibition at Hauser + Wirth in Los Angeles), has always been about the paint.

“Not that memory and emotion and other things mustn’t be there too, but it’s primarily about the paint,” he explained.

That fixation on the medium itself, and Bowling’s evident delight in the process of spilling, smearing, throwing and spraying rich colors onto raw canvas are at the heart of a longstanding experimental streak that runs throughout the more than 45 works on view at SFMOMA. (The show added 11 to the exhibition that originated at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston).

Bowling has often remarked that “the possibilities of paint are never-ending.” After emigrating from South America to London at age 15, Bowling was accepted in 1959 to the Royal College of Art where his classmates includedDavid Hockneyand R. B. Kitaj. Bowling’s early work played with Francis Bacon-esque expressionism and Pop art elements before moving fully into abstraction by 1966, the year he moved to New York.

The SFMOMA exhibition, which is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work in more than four decades, highlights the astonishingly productive decade Bowling spent in the U.S. He arrived in the art world’s epicenter when debates were roiling about Abstract Expressionism and the political role of the Black artist. Bowling resisted being hemmed in by any ideas of what Black art should be, instead writing an infamous 1971 essay, “Is Black Art About Color?” in which he posed questions like whether modernist color-field abstraction was its own radical end.

他是一个黑色的实验艺术家在sn工作ow-white art world, and yet “he was resistant to pigeonholing and adamant that he was not going to be bullied into creating art that was anything but true to his own vision,” Roberts told The Chronicle while in one of several rooms at SFMOMA dedicated to Bowling’s celebrated map paintings.

The map series includes Bowling’s most iconic works, incorporating blurry outlines of South America and Africa, sometimes Australia and Europe, against oceanic backgrounds of color. They suggest displacement and the pull of geographical memory. Although he left Guyana as a teenager, Bowling later said, “I don’t think what you see or feel in the world when you open your eyes for the first time ever leaves you. Historical memory is hardly ever erased.”

Standing in front of the exhibition’s 1969 stunner “Dan Johnson’s Surprise,” Ben Bowling recalled how his father chanced upon what would become his trademark style while living at New York’s Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s.

“He was given a suite by the hotel’s owner, with the idea that he’d swap his work for lodging (and) his room must have been south facing because it had sunlight coming in through the day,” he explained, noting that after his father put squares of canvas on the floor, “he started to see maps forming in the shadows’ patterns on the canvas, and he started following those shadows with the paint.”

By being open to the unpredictable nature of inspiration, Bowling landed on the style that’s perhaps his greatest contribution to modernism. Eventually, he let the continents fade away, leaving him with just the luminosity of color itself.

“Dad is still ambitious,” Ben Bowling said, adding that while his father is largely confined to a wheelchair now, he still works in his South London studio several times a week. Ben lives two minutes away and meets him there three days a week, “and what he’s doing now I think is about as exciting as it gets.”

Jessica Zack is a freelance writer.