Denzil Forrester

Over more than four decades, Denzil Forrester has developed a painting practice rooted in the vital sounds and energy of London’s dub and reggae scene in the early 1980s, giving form to rhythm, movement and emotion through line and colour. He translates the techniques of sampling, mixing and looping into visual terms, creating bold, dynamic compositions that are rooted in tradition while remaining distinctly his own.

Born in Grenada in 1956, Forrester moved to London in 1967. As a student at the Central School of Art and later the Royal College of Art in London, he began sketching inside Dalston and Stoke Newington nightclubs, establishing early in his career the subject matter that would endure in his practice. ‘In these clubs city life is recreated in essence; sounds, lights, police sirens, bodies pushing and swaying back and forth,’ he says. ‘It’s a continuation of city life with some spiritual fulfilment.’ The dark, pounding venues became his very own life-drawing rooms. Seated at tables, behind drinks bars or on mezzanines, he recorded the frenetic movements of dancers in quick, four- to five-minute studies – the length of a record – using pastels, charcoal and a sketchbook. This mode of drawing still serves as a foundation for Forrester’s painting practice today. From the sketches he continues to make in clubs, individual figures are extracted, collaged and reimagined into new, amalgamated compositions worked out on canvas as underdrawings, over which he applies bright facets of colour with oil paint.

Forrester’s paintings explore the nightclub as a container for ecstatic joy, music and expression, but also melancholy and homesickness. These were ‘holy’ places, as he describes, home to transcendental figures like Jah Shaka, the legendary Jamaican soundsystem operator, and a congregation made up of London’s Windrush and Afro-Caribbean communities. They reflected the duality of London’s social and cultural landscape, existing alongside the racial tensions and police violence of the 1980s. While Forrester observed freedom in the shapes of bodies dancing, singing, gambling, playing dominoes and sleeping, outside, police cars trawled East London’s streets, conducting stop and searches. ‘There was an energy and an excitement of being all together in this one space,’ he recalls. ‘But there was also a deep longing in the bodies in these rooms. They were missing back home, but there was no “back home” to go to. And the music linked all that together.’ 

The distinctive, jewel-like surfaces of Forrester’s paintings, rendered across canvases that stretch nine feet tall, are derived from the loose, broken lines of gesture from the original drawings. He would produce upwards of 50 sketches a night, drawing with both hands, moving to the heavy rhythm of the music, scratching marks on the page like a DJ. ‘The drawings were made in the dark. I couldn’t see what I was doing. You’ve got to feel as if you’re out there with the people, dancing and moving.’ Details in Forrester’s paintings are therefore left intentionally ambiguous – evoking figures obscured in the darkness or fractured into shards by strobe lights – scattering scenes into infinite possible realities. And yet, the works are compositionally precise, each surface a careful arrangement of essential, interlocking shapes. ‘I wanted to have a sense of distortion [...] that sense of fear,’ he says. At times, glimpses of a brutal, outside world appear like phantoms, blurring what is real and imagined. Policemen surge from shadows, and in Funeral of Winston Rose (1981) – a painting inspired by the composition of El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) – the party congregates around an open coffin, and the dancehall becomes a space of grief and mourning.

Forrester draws not only from an archive of his own work, but from a deep immersion in art history and the works of painters as wide-ranging as Giotto, Goya, Caravaggio, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Paul Cézanne, Picasso and the French Impressionists. This foundation of his practice, grounded in acute observation, draughtsmanship and a commitment to the act of painting, has enabled him to forge a new visual language through which to capture the world around him with striking immediacy. As poet and painter John Lyons wrote in 1990 at the time of Forrester’s solo exhibition, Dub Transition, at Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, ‘Denzil’s respect for tradition is a manifestation of the will to find an identity within two cultures, Afro-Caribbean and European, for both have played a vital role in his process of maturing as an artist.’

The artist’s rich, saturated palettes respond to his environments and the places he has lived, in turn inspired by Grenada’s sun-drenched landscape and his childhood memories of Carnival, as well as Rome, where he completed a residency at the British School in 1983–85, absorbing from the city and its wealth of fine art an appreciation for pure, crisp light. Through colour, Forrester injects the spirit and energy of his homeland into his paintings – a quality he found distilled within London’s nightclubs. His adoption of soft, luminous purples, violets and blues over the past decade reflects the clear light and atmosphere in Cornwall, where Forrester relocated in 2016 and now lives and works.

As Forrester’s practice continues to develop and expand, so too do the opportunities to sample and rework his own material. As artist Peter Doig observes, ‘A revelation for me has been seeing the recent work coming out of Denzil’s studio. It has a subtlety and form that perhaps comes about because he is reflecting upon his past. These new paintings are dreamlike and emerge as much from his imagination as from his studies of real life.’ Forrester builds a kind of pictorial feedback or reverb in his paintings, transplanting figures and motifs from earlier works to generate entirely new compositions. This agile and highly iterative process is, in part, inspired by the DJs of his generation. ‘In reggae, dub guys used to have battles by doing different versions of the same records,’ he says. ‘From that, I decided to explore making versions of my paintings.’

Born in Grenada in 1956, Denzil Forrester moved to London in 1967 and now lives and works in Cornwall, UK. Forrester received a BA in Fine Art from the Central School of Art, London, in 1979 and an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1983. He was awarded the decoration of Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in December 2020. Forrester received the Morley Fellowship from Morley College, London, in 2019; a Harkness Fellowship in New York in 1986-88; and a scholarship from the British School at Rome in 1983-85.

Forrester was recently included in The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, which was curated by Ekow Eshun and toured from the National Portrait Gallery, London, to The Box, Plymouth; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2024–25). In 2023, major solo exhibitions of his work opened at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Forrester was awarded the 2021 South Bank Sky Arts Award for his solo exhibition Itchin & Scratchin, which travelled from Nottingham Contemporary to Spike Island, Bristol (2020–21). A large-scale public artwork for Brixton Underground Station was unveiled by Transport for London in September 2019. His work was the focus of three solo exhibitions curated by Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs at the Jackson Foundation, St Just, Cornwall (2018); White Columns, New York (2016); and Tramps, London (2016).

In recent years, notable group exhibitions include the Backyard Biennial: East, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2026); The Music is Black: A British Story, V&A East Museum, London (2026); Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2026); London Calling, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague (2026); The Power of Drawing, Royal Drawing School, London (2025); Beautiful Collisions, SXSW London (2025); Drawing the Unspeakable, Towner Eastbourne (2024); Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music, British Library, London (2024); Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield East (2023); Is it morning for you yet?, 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 50s – Now, Tate Britain, London (2021); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London (2021); and Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House, London (2019).

Forrester’s works can be found in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Tate, UK; Arts Council Collection, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; and Long Museum, Shanghai, amongst many others.