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.
Frank Bowling
B. 1934, Bartica, Guyana. Lives and works in London.
Frank Bowling moved to the U.K. from Guyana in 1953, aged just 19, as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants who would transform the country’s life and culture. His style of abstraction—with thick layers of bright acrylics dripped, sprayed, or rolled onto canvas, topped with found objects and shimmering pigments—borrows from the luminosity of British landscape painters, such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and the experimental techniques of the abstract expressionists he observed while living in New York between 1966 and 1975.
Bowling has been a force for decades, but his inclusion in Tate Modern’s acclaimed exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983” in 2017, and a retrospective at Tate Britain two years later, thrust him into the spotlight. He’s since had major shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received the 2022 Wolfgang Hahn Prize.
Michaela Yearwood-Dan
B. 1994, London. Lives and works in London.
Deliberately femme and designed to soothe, Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s canvases make you feel good. They’re replete with abstract gestures that call to mind blossoms and leaves, painted in peaches and blues, purples and greens. Look closely, and you’ll see snippets of text to suggest the artist’s headspace—and often, she’s got love on the brain. “I think there’s a vulnerability and a strength to being a woman, a Black artist, and a queer artist talking about subjects like love in a very personal and diaristic form, and making that a stronger factor than all the larger political identifiers that the wider art world would probably want you to talk about—trauma porn to everyone else apart from those living it,” she told Artsy.
Yearwood-Dan has exhibited prolifically across London and New York since 2019, and her work has been acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Jorge M. Perez Collection, among other institutions. Her largest commission, the 10-foot-tall Let Me Hold You, was installed at the Queercircle, an LGBTQ+ cultural center in North Greenwich, London, last year.
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.
Winston Branch
B. 1947, Castries, St. Lucia. Lives and works in London.
Like most abstract painters, Winston Branch began in figuration. Born and raised in St. Lucia, he had his earliest exposure to fine art through Catholic iconography at the island’s cathedral. He carried his focus on the body with him to London, where he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and immersed himself in the city’s art world elite. “But as I grew older, I disengaged in the overt representation of painting. So I moved away from figuration, and looked really at not the symbolism of the figure, but the tonal structures of the figures, where the different fresh pigment would relate and give light and give movement,” he said in an interview with Christie’s. While on a Guggenheim fellowship in New York, “I saw the paintings of Clyfford Still and it made me realize I did not want to use color as illustration but as its own autonomy.”
In Branch’s abstraction, figures and landscapes are dissolved into luminous and textured fields of acrylic. His work has been collected by the Tate, the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the National Trust of St. Lucia; in 2022, he held his first solo exhibition in the U.K. in 25 years at Simon Lee Gallery in London.
Jadé Fadojutimi
B. 1993, London. Lives and works in London.
For Jadé Fadojutimi, painting is both an act of self-expression as well as a tool of self-discovery. Her brightly colored “emotional landscapes”—with their frenetic, looping strokes and saturated palette—are truly diaristic, reflecting her ongoing anime obsession (she’s traveled to Japan regularly since graduating from the Slade School in 2015), her love of fashion, and her own questions and memories. The works’ tremendous scale creates an immersive sensation, inviting the viewer to indulge their senses and draw their own connections.
In 2020, she became the youngest artist to have a painting acquired by the Tate when the collection snatched up I Present Your Royal Highness (2018), and since then, institutional interest has only grown. Represented by Gagosian, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Taka Ishii Gallery, she’s exhibited across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., and her work is now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Hurvin Anderson
B. 1965, Birmingham, U.K. Lives and works in Cambridge, U.K. and London.
In his own words, Hurvin Anderson paints landscapes and interiors “in their strictest form”—fealty to the source material is hardly a priority. He typically starts with a photograph of a scene that recalls Black British life and his Jamaican heritage, such as Afro-Caribbean barber shops or tropical gardens, and distorts it, layering it with bold patches of color, grids, and abstract patterns. In doing so, he plays with ideas of identity and memory, and the malleability of both.
Enam Gbewonyo
B. 1980, London. Lives and works in London.
Untitled I, 2019
Enam Gbewonyo
Delphian Gallery
British-Ghanaian artist and curator Enam Gbewonyo began her career as a knitwear designer in New York. But after nearly a decade in the trade, she pivoted, using her degree in textile design as the basis of a studio practice marrying textile art, performance, and film.
Her medium of choice? The humble nylon stocking. In her hands, they’re torn apart, woven together, burned, and embroidered; worked into sculptures, or else wrapped around canvases. This is all part of Gbewonyo’s ongoing exploration of the marginalization of Black women and the healing power of craft.
In 2022, Gbewonyo participated in the Black Rock Senegal residency, founded by Kehinde Wiley, and was awarded both the Henry Moore Foundation Grant, and the NAE Exhibition Prize.
Zak Ové
B. 1966, London. Lives and works in Gran Canaria, Spain, and London.
Invisible Man, 2021
Zak Ové
De Buck Gallery
The son of Trinidadian-born director Horace Ové—widely recognized as the first Black British film director—Zak Ové grew up in a home where activists congregated in the backyard; Carnival sound systems were sacred; and Black history was something to be preserved at all costs, he has explained in interviews. This upbringing helped shape his multidisciplinary practice, which uses traditions and symbols from across the diaspora to explore the past and imagine new futures using plastic, metal, and wood, as well as a variety of found and recycled materials.
Ové’s sculptures, installations, and assemblages have brought him international renown, such as the widely exhibited Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (2016), an army of two-meter-high graphite sculptures representing the strength and resilience of the diaspora. He is also known for his “Moko Jumbie” (2015) sculptures. Inspired by the stilt-walking masqueraders who parade at Trinidad Carnival, they floated above the British Museum’s great court (the museum’s first commission by a Caribbean artist). But for nearly a decade, he’s also been weaving works of “granny psychedelia”—canvases inspired by traditions of Carnival, Trinidadian craft, and European crochet, where brightly colored doilies bloom in kaleidoscopic patterns.
Ové has been the subject of exhibitions around the world. And In 2019, he took on the mantle of curator, leading Somerset House’s 2019 exhibition “Get Up Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers,” celebrating 50 years of Black creativity in the U.K.
Anthony Daley
B. 1960, Jamaica. Lives and works in London.
Anthony Daley’s hazy, richly saturated paintings seem somehow lit from within. For the artist, this quality evokes his childhood in Jamaica. “After it rained you would go deep into the bushes and see the light shining through,” he said. “Chasing the beauty and the magic as a child has never left me.”
Daley moved from Jamaica to London aged seven, and rose to prominence in the early ’80s, when he began exhibiting with the influential London gallerist Angela Flowers, and was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work has been collected by the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which hosted a solo show of new work by Daley inspired by Rubens in 2022.
Emmanuel Awuni
B. 1993, Accra, Ghana. Lives and works in London.
Nature Boi, 2022
Emmanuel Awuni
PM/AM
Days spent in the sun, 2023
Emmanuel Awuni
Copperfield
Accra-born artist Emmanuel Awuni works across conceptual sculpture and warm-hued abstract paintings, which are often presented in dialogue with one another. At “I Know why the Caged Bird Sings,” his 2022 exhibition at Copperfield, for example, a wall of bars provides physical and thematic framing for the mixed-media works and swirling, warm-hued paintings displayed around them.
Through his work, Awuni has explored such themes as non-violent resistance, displacement, and social hierarchies, and taken inspiration from hip-hop, architecture and the words of Black writers, including Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. A recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, he received the Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture in 2021, and has since exhibited in London and Germany.
Browse available works in the collection “Black British Abstraction.”
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