by At the start of this amazing exhibition – amazing from start to finish – are two mysterious screen prints by the American artist Lorna Simpson, in which Black faces Evan magazine ads are superimposed on each other. At first it looks like you’re looking at a 60s model, frozen and clueless, in heavy eyeliner and beehive. But through a simple overlay, her face shifts, her right eye quickens and she breaks out of her pose. Through layers of indigo blue and emerald, a model turns into a human being, coming alive into our presence.
This spinning back and forth over time is enigmatic, and beautiful to behold. It may also stand as an emblem for this show. The representation of Black figures in art goes back for centuries, but so often as a succession of symbols, masks, cyphers or types – it is simply something other than expressing themselves. The time is always now a huge change in western culture. In all these works – made in the 21st century, by 22 great British and American artists – each Black person is allowed to be their own unique individual.
This is Jennifer Packer’s wonderful portrait of her friend Ivan, lost in thought on a seat that you can only deduce from his tortured posture, hands hanging between his wide knees, one sock on, the other leg bare. The magenta of his sweatshirt seems to tighten the air around him, as well as his lower lip and nose; if not the color of his own thought.
Packer’s fellow New Yorker, Jordan Casteel, paints an elderly couple sitting on a street bench somewhere in Harlem. The late afternoon sun touches their hoods and fields with fugitive light. Their smile deserves your smile in return. Her arthritic fingers, intertwined, stiff, are in the center of the canvas.
Game Njideka Akunyili Crosby on You Still Bloom in This Land Without Gardens The artist shows herself, in a dress of patterned Nigerian cotton, a young son on her knees, almost camouflaged behind the blooming plants in her garden. But they are imaginary, and many hours of library research were created to find out about species that thrive in Nigeria and California, where the artist now lives. Crosby’s glorious painted collages combine naturalism with graphic quotations and pastiche. Through the open door, pinned to the fridge in the kitchen, you see her gorgeous reprise of a photograph of her late mother.
Barbara Walker, who was shortlisted for last year’s Turner prize, portrays the people of the past in her fierce but sensitive work. Heating Point series, literally plucked from old pictures. In his version of Pierre Mignard Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, With an Unknown Female Attendant (1682), the Duchess is reduced to a relief outline on a blank page – essentially blank – and the attendant becomes the protagonist, smiling stoically in graphite and colored pencil. You are now looking (only) at the unexpected.
Two of British artist Hurvin Anderson’s post-pop paintings depict the shabby shop in Birmingham where his father used to cut his hair, as well as other Windrush customers. A man sits with his back to us in a cape that could be Caribbean fabric. Her face is invisible in the few mirrors in this unreal room. The roof opens out into a white void above. His father is alone, contained in his dreams or memories.
Such is the power of thought in these images, and it is often carried in these images means of expression. Amy Sherald A midsummer afternoon’s dream (2020), for example, shows a white picket fence running between a bright blue sky and a manicured lawn. A woman with white sneakers and a summer frock on a bicycle, her basket filled with flowers and a cute lapdog. It’s all beautifully painted, almost Alex Katz in his stylish flatness. Except that the woman is not white, nor quite Black, but strangely gray. You can’t see her first (or last) in terms of color. Sherald uses pin-sharp reality to question the reality of the image itself.
There are many other stars in this show – Chris Ofili, Michael Armitage, Claudette Johnson and Kerry James Marshall – whose pioneering works are presented in their own special enclave. His was Untitled (Painter) from 2009 seems in this context newly powerful and sardonic. The Black woman in a striped smock, holding a brush in a mars-black hand against an even blacker background, appears to be working on a paint-by-numbers self-portrait where someone else decided the bright color palette.
There are paintings by famous artists that even the most frequent visitor to the gallery has never seen; and artists who will certainly go on to achieve that fame. Ekow Eshun’s curation is thoughtful, far-sighted and full of virtue. So is the design of the show, by JA Projects, where walls transition from oceanic blue brushmarks to silvery steel to a delightful lawn of green carpet in the final gallery, which seems to rise to a magnificent double portrait with LA artist Henry Taylor. .
This painting, from 2023, shows Taylor sitting outside with his great friend, the artist Noah Davis, who he looks at with an empathy that can only be called the gentle brushwork. Davis died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 32. This is a posthumous portrait and eulogy.
Davis is the greatest revelation of all – a great monitor of shapes and images, strange scenes and memories. A Chicago swimming pool from the days of segregation (it takes a moment to notice that all the figures are Black) is brought into the scene by the flying soles of a diver’s feet in the center of the canvas. And the haunting Mary Jane: a girl in oversized shoes, hands already working so they seem too big for her thin body, a slightly spectral face: here but already disappearing, a last glimmer of time.
Soulscapes, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, includes some of the same Black artists reimagining landscapes. It’s an ideal companion show. There are textiles – Kimathi Mafafo’s gorgeous embroidery, in which the artist emerges from a muslin cocoon into a lush landscape; photographs – black montages of Mónica de Miranda in formal attire, all at sea in distant oceans. An exquisite film by Phoebe Boswell overlays footage of fishermen working slowly during the day on the African coast to melancholy effect; he plays in the mausoleum.
But the painting is bigger (as always in this genre). Some of it is too large to be seen far enough in a narrow gallery enfilade; and some feel a little immature. But there are marvels of the imagination. Christina Kimeze on Wader – a lonely, pensive and pregnant woman in a glowing pond – the person marries a landscape in a fever dream of paint. The deep waters of Ravelle Pillay, overhung with shadowy fronds, are a formidable threat.
And Hurvin Anderson is huge Limestone Wall pictures of some strange concrete structures glimpsed through deep forests in the Caribbean, lost like some ancient ruins. Or does it? There is a faint grid over the whole scene, pinned together with points of bright color, and the foliage runs in liquid volumes – a picture of a memory, or perhaps a vision that did not really exist.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Time Is Now: Artists Reframe the True Black ★★★★★
Soulscapes ★★★
