Bass Culture On the art of Denzil Forrester
By Barry Schwabsky
JUST AS ÉDOUARD MANET and his Impressionist friends drew inspiration from the music halls and cabarets of Belle Epoque Paris, Denzil Forrester has become known for paintings that capture the energy and style of everyday people gathered for relaxation and collective enjoyment in the dance clubs of Afro-Caribbean London since the 1980s. As Andrew Hunt noted in these pages in a 2020 review, “his early work didn’t simply reflect black communities’ countercultural expression through music and the reggae, dub, and dancehall clubs where it thrived and where he was a persistent presence with his sketch pad; his paintings actively helped shape these scenes by establishing their visual identity.”
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Understandably, a lot of the discourse around Forrester’s work has focused on its specific roots in the cultural creativity of a generation of migrants who, like the artist, had to make a transition from mostly rural upbringings in the Caribbean to a new urban life in a conspicuously racist London—not the postwar Windrush generation (named after a ship that arrived bearing over a thousand émigrés in 1948) but a later cohort who, as art historian Eddie Chambers points out in a 2019 catalogue essay, began to forge a new Black British (rather than West Indian) identity. “The major central factor and component in this new Black identity was music, specifically reggae,” he added. A new kind of public space was invented in which to manifest this music and this identity. As Forrester is the only painter to have rooted his art so deeply and so manifestly in this milieu, his work is a vital document of a remarkable period of cultural transformation—as he himself has said, “a very magical and active time, full of satisfying imagery for me.”
But the circulation of artworks to places far removed from their origins, and their persistence beyond the time of their creation, demands that they be seen not only as historical documents but as explorations of pictorial possibility. A telling anecdote: In the catalogue for his Kemper Museum and ICA Miami shows, Forrester recalls that, when he was a student, “my younger brothers started getting into sound systems. A lot of my mum’s generation had parties in the front room and invited their friends.” (Think of the house party depicted in Steve McQueen’s great film Lovers Rock, 2020, which is set in 1980, right in the midst of Forrester’s student years.) “The younger generation started having parties away from the house. In public spaces. That’s what my younger brothers started going to. I didn’t want to go to those parties, because at art school we traveled a lot. We went to Amsterdam to see the van Goghs, we went to Kröller-Müller to this massive state-of-the-art museum, and all over France to see Impressionist paintings.” The Cave, 1978, is a very early (and already very ambitious) treatment of a dancehall scene, but Forrester doesn’t seem to have settled on this milieu as his primary resource until the early 1980s.
