Claudette Johnson: Darker Than Blue

22 Jun-15 Sep 2024

Overview

Claudette Johnson – recently shortlisted for the 2024 Turner Prize – is one of the most exciting and prominent artists working in the UK today. New and recent work features here in her first solo exhibition in the West Midlands.

Johnson is best known for her powerful depictions of the Black figure, reasserting its presence in histories of Western art. Her primary subjects are Black women, including herself, and, more recently, Black men. Through these figures, Johnson employs a powerful style to explore the body; her work challenges perceptions of identity, sexuality and wider political and social constraints, particularly those affecting Black diasporic communities.

This exhibition includes large-scale, vibrantly coloured works in oil and pastel stick, gouache and other media, often on oversized paper sheets, alongside smaller sketches that reveal the intimacy of her work. It also features an immersive soundscape by Trevor Mathison – the first collaboration between the two artists.

“Art makes life worth living […] it’s one of the last free places on earth you can go to. Where there is nothing to restrict or bind you. Where you can be free.” - Claudette Johnson, 2023.

Claudette Johnson was born in Manchester and is deeply connected to the West Midlands through her studies at Wolverhampton University’s School of Art. As the recent exhibition The More Things Change… (April – July 2023, Wolverhampton Art Gallery) explored, Johnson was a vital member of the Blk Art Group formed in 1980, a radical group of artists that began the ongoing challenge to readdress the lack of representation of, and support for, Black artists.

We are honoured to be collaborating with Johnson on this exhibition, which will be the artist’s first solo show in the region. It will be accompanied by an interdisciplinary programme of events. This exhibition follows Johnson’s widely acclaimed retrospective exhibition Claudette Johnson: Presence, at the Courtauld Gallery, London (September 2023 – January 2024).

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