Peter Doig Wants to Make Denzil Forrester, a Painter of the Afro-Caribbean Experience in England, Much More Famous
By Naomi Rea
There is a lot going on in Cornwall: The international art festival Groundwork will see Steve McQueen head to the Southwest of England, while last weekend Tate St Ives opened a major survey of Patrick Heron’s work. Up next this weekend, Cornwall is getting a show of paintings by the long-overlooked black British artist, Denzil Forrester. A member of the Windrush generation, Forrester was born in Grenada and came to London as a child in 1967. He is now based in Cornwall, where his solo show takes place in the tiny former mining town of St. Just.
It is the latest in a series of shows of the 62-year-old artist’s work that has been co-organized by fellow artist Peter Doig and the director of New York’s White Columns, Matthew Higgs.
Doig, whose paintings sell for millions at auction, tells artnet News that he first encountered the work of the Grenada-born artist at Forrester’s graduation show at the Royal College of Art in the early ’80s; At the time Doig was a student at St Martins in London. The two did not actually meet in person until 2015. “I am as interested in some other artists’ work as much as I am in what I’m trying to do myself,” Doig says. Doig and Higgs’ support is paying off. Last year, Forrester’s Three Wicked Men was acquired by Tate Britain.
The new exhibition is called “From Trench Town to Porthtowan,” after one of Forrester’s recent paintings. It opens on May 26 and runs through June 23 at the Jackson Foundation Gallery in Just-in-Penwith. Forrester’s previous exhibitions selected by the two artists focused on the painter’s early work, and some of these appear in the show in Cornwall, such as ones depicting the arrest in 1981 of a family friend, Winston Rose. He died in a police van taking him to a psychiatric hospital after being restrained by 11 police officers.
Forrester’s early paintings documented the Afro-Caribbean community in London in the 1980s, a time of rising tension between the police and the members of the young black community, which resulted in the 1981 Brixton Riots in south London.
The artist painted one of the regular police raids on blues and dub nightclubs, such as Phebes, All Nations, and Four Aces in Hackney, East London. He distilled the local dub-reggae scene in several rapid gesture drawings, which he later transformed into large scale paintings in his studio. The work is significant for its divergence from the fashions of the art scene of the day, both stylistically—by leaning into the narrative and away from lyrical abstraction—and in the subject matter—black British culture.
