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Lot Essay
The painter Denzil Forrester is among the most celebrated chroniclers of a vivid era in Black culture. His canvases are paeans to the coming together of Afro-Caribbean communities in the dub-reggae nightclubs that thrived in London in the late 1970s and early ’80s; clubs he began frequenting as an art student. His paintings depict these now-shuttered spaces for communal revelry in large-scale, vividly colored oil paintings, realized with thumping compositional rhythm and populated with expressionist figures. Long admired within this alternative scene, Forrester’s work has received renewed institutional acclaim in recent years on both sides of the Atlantic, having been represented within major museum surveys at Tate Britain and the Hayward Gallery (both 2021) and in acquisitions by major institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum in New York—largely thanks to the support of the artist Peter Doig, who since 2015 has been Forrester’s most influential champion.
Street Music, a work of audacious colorism and irresistible groove, reveals Forrester at the very height of his powers. It is a rhapsody of blues, shading from the cool cyan of the jukebox at the heart of the composition, via the gradations of turquoise that define the shirt and pants of the dancer in the center of the foreground, to the rich indigo of the towering speakers behind. The characteristically complex, geometric interplay of raking diagonals, hatchings and cross-hatchings calls to mind strobe lights—as do the splashes of greens, reds, yellows and above all complementary oranges that serve to intensify the blues, most vividly in the astounding set piece of four costumed revelers off to the right, intimately interlinked and with limbs dissolving in a whorl of light and motion.
The title suggests perhaps that it was painted in a club during London’s famous Notting Hill Carnival (one of the biggest street festivals in the world), and a subject which Forrester has painted often, though also surely infused with Forrester’s early childhood memories of Carnival in Grenada (events he has described as ‘part of your DNA’ for those from the West Indies). The intoxicating rhythm of line and color is reminiscent of Henri Matisse, particularly La Danse. It was to the influence of Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, and the German Expressionists that Forrester looked as a student at the Central School of Art and then the Royal College of Art, flying in the face of the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism then prevailing at those institutions.
By the time he came to paint Street Music, Forrester’s style had matured considerably since his student days, when he first began taking a large sketchbook to all-night parties at storied music venues such as Phebes or the Four Nations, to draw the likes of DJ Jah Shaka. In 1983, he embarked on a two-year residency at the British School in Rome. The experience of forced distance from his subject matter was a key incentive in forging his distinctive style, one that could be equal to the profound expression of identity, belonging and togetherness that these clubs represented for the first generation of children born to Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain after World War Two. These places became havens at a time of simmering tensions between Black communities in London and the police.
Forrester sits on the cusp of two key generations in the history of Black arts in Britain. Like Tam Joseph, Althea McNish and others, he came of age in the 1970s—described by the scholar Eddie Chambers as a “critical bridge, a decade of transition,” just after the pioneering efforts of Frank Bowling and Ronald Moody and distinguished by the fact that these artists were almost all brought up in Britain before studying at UK institutions (E. Chambers, Black Artists in British Art : A History since The 1950s, London 2014, p. 74). But Forrester is also now recognized as having played a crucial role in the Black Arts Movement founded in 1982, alongside John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective, Dame Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid. That his luminous, painterly constructions stand their ground among work that is predominantly more conceptual and reliant on new media is rich testament to the unparalleled power of his paintings to transport his viewers into the thick of it, amid the heat, the light, the pounding music and the intense social intimacy of this foundational and unrepeatable moment in Black history.
Street Music, a work of audacious colorism and irresistible groove, reveals Forrester at the very height of his powers. It is a rhapsody of blues, shading from the cool cyan of the jukebox at the heart of the composition, via the gradations of turquoise that define the shirt and pants of the dancer in the center of the foreground, to the rich indigo of the towering speakers behind. The characteristically complex, geometric interplay of raking diagonals, hatchings and cross-hatchings calls to mind strobe lights—as do the splashes of greens, reds, yellows and above all complementary oranges that serve to intensify the blues, most vividly in the astounding set piece of four costumed revelers off to the right, intimately interlinked and with limbs dissolving in a whorl of light and motion.
The title suggests perhaps that it was painted in a club during London’s famous Notting Hill Carnival (one of the biggest street festivals in the world), and a subject which Forrester has painted often, though also surely infused with Forrester’s early childhood memories of Carnival in Grenada (events he has described as ‘part of your DNA’ for those from the West Indies). The intoxicating rhythm of line and color is reminiscent of Henri Matisse, particularly La Danse. It was to the influence of Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, and the German Expressionists that Forrester looked as a student at the Central School of Art and then the Royal College of Art, flying in the face of the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism then prevailing at those institutions.
By the time he came to paint Street Music, Forrester’s style had matured considerably since his student days, when he first began taking a large sketchbook to all-night parties at storied music venues such as Phebes or the Four Nations, to draw the likes of DJ Jah Shaka. In 1983, he embarked on a two-year residency at the British School in Rome. The experience of forced distance from his subject matter was a key incentive in forging his distinctive style, one that could be equal to the profound expression of identity, belonging and togetherness that these clubs represented for the first generation of children born to Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain after World War Two. These places became havens at a time of simmering tensions between Black communities in London and the police.
Forrester sits on the cusp of two key generations in the history of Black arts in Britain. Like Tam Joseph, Althea McNish and others, he came of age in the 1970s—described by the scholar Eddie Chambers as a “critical bridge, a decade of transition,” just after the pioneering efforts of Frank Bowling and Ronald Moody and distinguished by the fact that these artists were almost all brought up in Britain before studying at UK institutions (E. Chambers, Black Artists in British Art : A History since The 1950s, London 2014, p. 74). But Forrester is also now recognized as having played a crucial role in the Black Arts Movement founded in 1982, alongside John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective, Dame Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid. That his luminous, painterly constructions stand their ground among work that is predominantly more conceptual and reliant on new media is rich testament to the unparalleled power of his paintings to transport his viewers into the thick of it, amid the heat, the light, the pounding music and the intense social intimacy of this foundational and unrepeatable moment in Black history.