Pera Museum presents Creation and Destruction: Frank Bowling, With Interruptions by Francis Bacon and Victor Willing, a major exhibition that places the work of world-leading painter Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA in conversation with two key figures from postwar British art, Francis Bacon and Victor Willing. Curated by Alistair Hicks and on view from 29 September 2026 to 31 January 2027, the exhibition marks the first presentation of Bowling's work in Istanbul, illuminating the artistic influences that informed his practices while revealing the unexpected affinities among three painters whose practices were shaped by an enduring commitment to experimentation and reinvention.
Although often associated with different artistic traditions (Bowling with abstraction, Bacon with figurative expressionism and Willing with magical realism) these three artists were connected by both personal relationships and a shared determination to push painting beyond convention. Bowling and Willing first met as students at the Royal College of Art in the late 1950s, while Willing maintained a close friendship with Bacon, then already a leading figure in London's artistic circles. Bowling also had a brief but formative friendship with Bacon, whose handling of paint and psychological intensity profoundly influenced his early figurative works. While each ultimately forged a distinct artistic language, their practices each demonstrate a willingness to embrace uncertainty, chance and risk.
At the heart of the exhibition is Frank Bowling (b. 1934, British Guiana, now Guyana), whose career has continually defied categorisation. Working between London and New York for more than six decades, Bowling has consistently expanded the possibilities of painting, 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), in which fields of colour are overlaid with stencilled outlines of the continents of Australia, South America, or Africa; Mother's House Revisited, 2026, the latest in his lifelong series of silkscreened canvases incorporating the image of his childhood home in Guyana; and two steel sculptures made at different moments in his career.
Displayed alongside Bowling's works are what curator Alistair Hicks describes as "interruptions": key works by Francis Bacon (1909–1992) and Victor Willing (1928–1988) that function "like compass points in getting one's bearings among Bowling's works." These interventions shape our understanding of Bowling's artistic evolution while revealing new links between the three painters. Highlights include striking portraits by Francis Bacon, such as Portrait of Lisa, 1956 and Study of a Nude, 1953–54, and significant late paintings by Victor Willing including Head VI, 1985.
Organised around the recurring themes of creation and destruction, order and chaos, and chance and control, the exhibition explores painting as a process of continual transformation. Visitors are invited to look closely at the physical act of painting: Bowling embraced chance through poured paint, layered surfaces and material accumulation; Bacon repeatedly reworked and destroyed canvases in pursuit of pictorial intensity; and, in the final years of his life, Willing set precise geometric structures against psychologically charged imagery, allowing order to appear perpetually on the verge of collapse. Across all three practices, paintings are created through accumulation, interruption and renewal: destruction emerges not as the opposite of creation, but as one of its essential conditions.
Creation and Destruction offers a fresh perspective on the shared culture of experimentation that defined painting during the postwar era in Britain, and how this influenced Bowling's practice. Rather than reinforcing established divisions between abstraction and figuration, it reveals how artistic innovation emerged through shared encounters and radically different responses to the same enduring question: what a painting can become.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication featuring essays by Alistair Hicks (curator), Jessica Cerasi (independent curator and Head of Programme at the Bagri Foundation) and Dilek Huseyinzadegan (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory University).
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the British Consulate General in Istanbul.
Opening times: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 7pm; Sunday, 12 - 6pm