Painter Denzil Forrester brings four decades of London’s dub-club nights to Thaddaeus Ropac

In a Denzil Forrester painting the dance floor never settles. Bodies lean into the bass, speaker stacks rise like the columns of a nave, and the same restless line that traces a dancer’s arm seems to carry the rhythm across the whole room. For more than four decades the Grenada-born British painter has turned the sound systems of London’s dub and reggae nights into pictures, borrowing the sampling, mixing and looping of the music he was drawing and translating them into repeated contours and layered colour. That practice now has a new home: Thaddaeus Ropac, the gallery with spaces in London, Paris, Salzburg, Milan and Seoul, has taken him on.

The move is less a discovery than a long-standing admiration made formal. In the announcement, Thaddaeus Ropac places Forrester in the line of painters who drew from music and nightlife, and credits him with an outstanding ability to distil a room’s energy and its shared emotions of joy, longing or fear, calling his canvases among the most distinctive of his generation. The gallery had already hung his work in Artists I Steal From, a group show curated by the painter Alvaro Barrington.

Denzil Forrester painting Three Wicked Men, a two-panel nightclub scene with uniformed police officers and dancers under a street lamp — Denzil Forrester, Three Wicked Men, 1982. Photo: Courtesy Tate, London. © Denzil Forrester

The method began in the clubs themselves. While most of his art-school contemporaries looked to North American abstract expressionism, Forrester took a sketchbook into venues such as Phebes in Dalston and drew the crowd as it moved. Monet’s water lilies and Van Gogh’s landscapes, he has said, were driven by something simple, painting itself: “You have to paint something that means something to you.”

Those nights were never only celebration. His nightclub is a container for ecstasy and for homesickness, and it stood alongside the racial tension and police violence of 1980s London. Three Wicked Men, from 1982 and now in the Tate collection, was prompted by the death of his friend Winston Rose under police restraint the year before; its title comes from a reggae track, and its three men are a policeman, a politician and a businessman.

Forrester’s draughtsmanship argues with a long lineage, from Giotto, Caravaggio and Goya to Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Cézanne and Picasso, and his palette follows the places he has lived: the saturated sun of a Grenadian childhood before he moved to London in 1967, the crisp light he absorbed during a residency at the British School at Rome, and the clear Cornish atmosphere of Truro, where he has worked since 2016. The painter Peter Doig describes the newest canvases as dreamlike, emerging as much from imagination as from life.

Denzil Forrester painting Professor Version, a violet and orange dancehall scene with a DJ at the decks and dancers seen from behind — Denzil Forrester, Professor Version, 2025. © Denzil Forrester. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac

Two of those recent works, Professor Version and Yard, both painted in 2025, will hang on the gallery’s booth D22 at Frieze London from 14 to 18 October. Thaddaeus Ropac will open its first solo exhibition of Forrester’s work in London in June 2027, timed with a survey of five decades of paintings and drawings at The Box in Plymouth. Until January 2027 his work also appears in The Music is Black: A British Story at V&A East Museum, after a recent showing in the Backyard Biennial: East at Whitechapel Gallery.

The sound systems have gone quiet in Dalston, but in Forrester’s studio the bass is still shaping the line.

Tags: art galleries, Frieze London, British painters, Denzil Forrester, Peter Doig, Tate