10 Black British Artists Working in Abstraction With Black people and their stories long excluded from their walls, institutions are finally welcoming in a wave of figurative Black artists into their galleries.

BY ALLYSSIA ALLEYNE

With Black people and their stories long excluded from their walls, institutions are finally welcoming in a wave of figurative Black artists into their galleries. How better to redress the absence of a people, it seems, than with subjects: characters through which to recount buried narratives and imagine new ones?

Recently, the U.K. has seen a number of prominent shows offering such representation. But the tradition of Black British artists communicating beauty, feeling, and social commentary through abstraction remains less well-documented.

Here, we spotlight 10 Black British abstract artists, from the trailblazing talent of Frank Bowling and Winston Branch, to millennial artists such as Rachel Jones and Michaela Yearwood-Dan, who are pushing the genre in new directions.

Rachel Jones
B. 1991, London. Lives and works in London.

If Yearwood-Dan’s oeuvre is there to soothe the senses, Rachel Jones’s oil stick-and-pastel paintings are there to jolt them to life. Her massive canvases are a clash of contrasting colors, textures, and gestures, moving from smooth plains and fog-like shading to erratic, scribble-like strokes. Look closely for disembodied eyes and ears, gold teeth and grills—motifs deployed to evoke the Black experience.

Though her own thinking is rooted in exploration of Black interiority, “the dream is for you to have that moment of thinking about the image or color and then to go outside of that, and think about how it relates to things that are from your own life or from your own understanding of art,” she said in an interview. “The idea of what it is to feel a shiver go from your spine up your body.”

Jones has generated international interest since she was included in Ralph Rugoff’s landmark “Mixing It Up: Painting Today” show at Hayward Gallery in 2021, and earlier this year, when Tate Britain decided to rehang their permanent collection, they brought her work to the fore. However, Jones is definitely not limiting herself to painting: She staged a performance of her first opera, Hey Maudie, at St James’s Church Piccadilly, in London (supported by Thaddaeus Ropac, which represents the artist) just last month.