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In 1961, when Frank Bowling was making the earliest work in this small but illuminating show, painters were expected to be either one thing or another, over a range of categories. They had to be either political, using art to better society, or formalist, insisting art be judged on its own terms. They had to belong either to the European or the American tradition. And they had to be a Black artist, meaning they had a duty to speak on behalf of the communities they were presumed to represent, or an artist (full stop), meaning that they were allowed to speak on behalf of everyone about whatever subject they chose (on condition they were white and ideally male). This young British-Guyanese artist, it soon becomes clear, did not like these options.

The early works suggest that he did at least try to fit in: 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, made when Bowling was at the Royal Academy in London, might have been designed to meet the professors’ expectations. A screaming black face amid this shambles of tortured bodies is linked by the wall text to the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the former prime minister of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, positioning Bowling as both a postwar existentialist grappling with the horror of the camps and a Black artist speaking to the postcolonial experience. Beggar No 5 (1962–63) is so heavily indebted to Francis Bacon that it would be dismissed as juvenile pastiche if it weren’t for the subject matter. It points to a career as a professionally Caribbean artist making paintings about “cane-cutting and suffering”, as Bowling once put it.

The problem is that these paintings don’t really work. It’s hard to imagine an adopted style less suited to a socially conscious artist: you would no more enlist Bacon to paint sympathetic portraits of society’s victims than employ him to photograph your wedding, and the apprentice does not share the macabre fascination with horror that gives the master’s paintings their dark and dangerous glamour.

Here is a gifted young artist struggling to find his own voice, and in another work, from 1964, this struggle manifests in an image that is much more expressive of suffering than those more mannered expressions of injustice. Following the either/or logic above, there are two ways to read this small painting of a flailing white form caught in an iridescent grid between two flat planes. Either we see it as a “pure” abstraction, whose discordant forms, brittle colours and claustrophobic composition successfully conjure a sense of panic and imprisonment.

Or we look to the wall text, learn that the painting is titled Swan and was inspired by the artist having witnessed a swan trapped in an oil slick on the Thames – and read it as a picture, meaning a story. In which case, we might see a migratory bird being suffocated by the same medium in which this oil painting is realised, or a symbol of transformation and doubled identity (think Swan Lake) struggling to cast off an imposed “blackness” that is frustrating its attempts to fly.

If each of these readings seem to depend on the other, that only makes the point that no way of seeing the world is exclusive of any other. But however you interpret it, Swan suggests Bowling had reached an impasse that demanded a radical change, and two years later he escaped London for New York. There he reinvented himself, so that an artist who in 1958 had written to the critic John Berger saying, “All I know is I want to paint my people: that is black people,” became a disciple of another critic, Clement Greenberg, for whom art was a purely aesthetic arena to be judged without reference to the politics, identity or the personal life of the artist.

Bowling seems to have found this enormously liberating. That freedom is apparent here in the glorious 1976 painting Lenoraseas. This vertical stripe of variegated pinks, yellows, whites and purples, executed by pouring paint down the canvas attached to a movable board, gives greater rein to his exceptional gifts as a colourist.

Yet there is more to this arrangement of colour and form than its wonderfully satisfying optical effects. Firstly, there is the physical surface of the painting, a mountainous terrain of ridges, plains and valleys created by the flow of the paint. Then there is the title, which alludes (among other things) to the village of Lenora in Guyana where the Essequibo River meets the Atlantic Ocean.

Which is to say, this is both an abstract painting and a picture of a river. It belongs with the sublime landscapes of Constable and Turner, and with the Platonic abstractions of Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler. It is a document of both personal and social history, given that this river is flowing into the body of water across which the artist and his ancestors under different circumstances travelled. The arrangement of colour and form is dazzling. A work of art, Bowling recognises, can be all of these things at the same time.

It gives us mighty rivers, lakes and oceans, but the most remarkable work in this exhibition transports us to a brook beside which a willow grows aslant. Pondlife (After Millais) transforms the most narratively overburdened painting in British art history – Millais’s Ophelia – into a hazy, humid, impressionistic atmosphere. It is a technically sophisticated work, in which the fluid handling of paint dissolves greens into blues and reds into golds, forcing the eye around the image until it falls into it.

But this atmosphere is polluted, or impure. The drowned body of Ophelia has been replaced by a jumble of found objects (fabric patches with serrated edges, what might be bolts or bottle tops) painted on to the surface of the canvas. The impression is wreckage from a shipwreck, dredged up by a storm. Like the bodies of water to which they so often allude, Bowling’s best paintings resist fixed identities, connect one place and culture to another, carry history in suspension and cannot easily be pinned down.

• Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 27 March-17 January 2027