Previously unseen Frank Bowling painting unveiled ahead of Tate Britain's retrospective on the artist

A previously unseen work by British painter Frank Bowling is today unveiled ahead of the artist’s first major retrospective opening in London.

Tate Britain’s exhibition collecting the Guyana-born artist’s works opens tomorrow, Friday May 31, to celebrate the 85-year-old’s lifetime body of work.

Among the paintings on display will be Wafting 2018, a new eight-foot canvas dissected with vertical strips of patterned fabric. It is shown alongside other works from the last six decades.

Bowling — an RAF veteran who came to Britain as part of the Windrush Generation in June 1953 aged 19 — continues to work in his south London studio.

Describing his new work, he said: “It’s like the journey from birth to death. It’s partly to do with that but the flow of paint is what hooks me. Life is not so straightforward, and happiness involves going with the flow.”

Bowling has been restricted to working while seated in recent years, with assistants helping him to pour, drip, splash and wash paint across canvases pinned to the wall or floor of the studio.

“I feared at first that my work would lose its touch and become inferior but now I feel the opposite,” he said.

“I can see more of what is happening and use these nimble people, my new painting tools, to do more of what I want to have done.

“I see my painting now as some of my best and most complex work, with over 50 years of experience and painting approaches to draw on and put together in new ways. I’m very excited about it.”

An early painting by Bowling, called Cover Girl 1966, has also gone on display for the first time in over 50 years at Tate Britain.