Thaddaeus Ropac now represents Denzil Forrester Revered Painter of U.K. Nightlife

By Jo Lawson-Tancred

Denzil Forrester, whose paintings pulsate with the rhythms of U.K. nightlife, has joined the roster at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.

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In a phone call, Ropac said he fell for Forrester’s paintings when artist Alvaro Barrington included Knights of Dub (2005) in “Artists I Steal From,” a group show he curated at the London gallery in 2019.

“This picture really stayed on my mind,” he said, adding that “only a great painter” could capture on canvas “the sounds and energy of London’s clubs,” in turn celebrating a city that has absorbed so many cultures from across the world.

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Forrester, now 70, came to London as a child in 1967 and began painting Black British life in the 1980s. He is best known for painting throbbing nightclubs, but his work also captured tensions between the police and the Afro-Caribbean community. The brutality of the 1981 Brixton Riots is the subject of paintings like Three Wicked Men (1982) and Death Walk (1983).

For three decades, Forrester worked in relative obscurity while teaching drawing and painting at Morley College in London. He only found widespread recognition in the U.K. a decade ago, thanks in part to the support of Doig, who gave Forrester his first gallery show in 20 years at his wife’s gallery Tramps in 2016. He has since exhibited at institutions internationally, including solo shows at Nottingham Contemporary, in 2021, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the ICA Miami, both in 2023.