Image: The Pera Museum
Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction, which opens at the Pera Museum on September 29, brings together works by Frank Bowling and two key figures from postwar British art: Francis Bacon and Victor Willing. With a spotlight on Bowling, the exhibition traces the artistic paths of three painters as they converge, diverge and intersect once again. Curated by Alistair Hicks, the exhibition marks the first presentation of Bowling’s work in Istanbul and explores the artist’s practice and sources of inspiration within the realms of experimentation, chance and reinvention. Through the tensions between creation and destruction, order and chaos, chance and control, painting emerges not as a completed surface but as a process of continual transformation.
Working between London and New York for more than six decades, Bowling has continually challenged established classifications throughout his career, moving freely between abstraction and memory, geometry and spontaneity. Spanning the breadth of his practice, the exhibition brings together iconic works alongside recent and previously unseen paintings. These include paintings from the celebrated Map series (1967-71), as well as Mother’s House Revisited (2026), in which Bowling returns to the image of the house where he spent his childhood in Guyana.
Displayed alongside Bowling’s works are works by Francis Bacon and Victor Willing, which exhibition curator Alistair Hicks deems ‘interruptions’. Hicks refers to these interventions as ‘compass points in getting one’s bearings among Bowling’s works’, in which they reveal the distinct and intersecting aspects of the three painters’ practices. Bacon’s Portrait of Lisa (1956) and Study of a Nude (1952–53), together with Willing’s Head VI (1985), created in the final years of his life, brings new perspectives to Bowling’s practice.
Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction offers a fresh perspective on the experimental approach that shaped postwar British painting and how Bowling transformed this influence within his own practice. Rather than reinforcing established divisions between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition reveals how artistic explorations emerged through shared encounters and radically different responses to the same enduring question: What can a painting become?
This exhibition is organised in collaboration with the British Consulate-General, Istanbul
Image: The Pera Museum
