Denzil Forrester, the Dub-Club Painter the Art World Took Thirty Years to See

Denzil Forrester

Born	1956 Grenada
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Member of the Order of the British Empire · South Bank Sky Arts Award · Korn Ferry

Each drawing lasted as long as a record. Denzil Forrester would take a table at the back of an east London club, or squeeze in behind the bar, and work in pastel and charcoal while Jah Shaka’s sound system shook the walls. When the tune ended, so did the sketch. Back in the studio, those three- or four-minute notations became canvases taller than a man, crammed with dancers, speaker stacks, strobe light and, now and then, the police.

Those paintings made his name once, slipped out of view for most of a working life, and are now being presented to the world as a rediscovery. The word flatters the people doing the discovering. Forrester never stopped painting the same subject; what changed was who was willing to look at it, and the distance between the work and its audience is the real story of his career.

He was born in 1956 in Hermitage, Grenada, and moved to London in 1967, growing up in Hackney. At home his mother set him to sewing garments to help the family get by, with reggae playing as he worked, a memory he would turn into the painting Stitch Up half a century later. By the time he finished a fine art degree at the Central School of Art in 1979, he was spending his nights at blues parties and sound-system dances with a sketchbook open. Jah Shaka, he has said, was “the main DJ and crowd that excited me”, a selector who worked the room like a witch doctor.

At the Royal College of Art, where he took his MA in painting between 1981 and 1983 as one of very few Black students on the course, the club drawings hardened into a method. Grief and anger hardened with them. In 1981 his friend and former flatmate Winston Rose died in police custody, and Forrester painted him into the canvases he sent to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the following year. Three Wicked Men, the 1982 painting that grew out of that death, is now in the collection of Tate.

For a few years the establishment seemed to be listening. Dub Charge hung at the Royal Academy in 1983. A scholarship took him to the British School at Rome from 1983 to 1985, and a Harkness Fellowship took him to New York from 1986 to 1988, where he had a solo show at the Limelight club. In 1987 he won the Korn/Ferry International Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and in 1990 the Harris Museum in Preston opened Dub Transition, a decade of his paintings that went on to tour British galleries.

Then the public record thins out. He taught drawing and painting for around thirty years, most of them at Morley College in London, which later named a studio after him. He kept painting. In 1995 he organised The Caribbean Connection at the Islington Arts Factory, where his own studio was, with work by Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody. By the early 1990s he had stopped going to the clubs regularly, working instead from the drawings he already had. “When I start a painting,” he has said, “I go back to my sketchbooks; they help me find myself.”

The usual account of what happened next gives the lead role to Peter Doig. Doig had seen Forrester’s degree show at the Royal College in 1983 and never forgot it; in 2015 he tracked him down through the historian Anne Walmsley and, with Matthew Higgs, curated shows at White Columns in New York and Tramps in London the following year. It is a generous story, and it is true, but it lets British institutions off lightly. The paintings had been there all along, and exhibitions such as No Colour Bar at the Guildhall Art Gallery in 2015 were already putting Black British art of the 1980s back on the wall. Forrester did not need to be found. He needed a market prepared to pay attention, and the risk since then has been that it treats him as the painter of a single decade, keener on the club scenes of a man in his twenties than on what the man in his sixties is making. Andrew Hunt, reviewing him in Artforum, called his rise “as unexpected as it is apposite”, which is accurate on both counts and also a measure of how low expectations had been.

The revival moved quickly. Stephen Friedman Gallery gave him a survey in London in 2019, and that September Transport for London unveiled Brixton Blue, a large public work for Brixton Underground station. Itchin & Scratchin opened at Nottingham Contemporary in 2020, travelled to Spike Island in Bristol and won a South Bank Sky Arts Award in 2021, the year he was appointed MBE in the New Year Honours. Hunt described the language of those pictures as “a kind of sonic dub cubism”, with echo, reverb and delay turned into brushwork. Tate Britain’s Life Between Islands and the Carnegie International followed, then solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and ICA Miami in 2023.

The newer paintings answer the charge that he is only replaying his youth. Since he settled in Cornwall in 2016, having bought a house in Truro a few years earlier, pinks and violets have crept into his palette, and the clubs now share canvases with beaches and bathers, as in From Trench Town to Porthtowan. In 2022 he painted Child Q, the fifteen-year-old Black schoolgirl strip-searched by police in 2020, standing at the centre of an empty club while three officers loom over her, an image that rhymes with Three Wicked Men forty years on. The subject he chose in his twenties has become a way of reading the present.

Recognition has kept arriving. In 2024 Stephen Friedman and Andrew Kreps shared a New York solo show, Two Islands, One World, curated by Sheena Wagstaff. In 2026 his work is on view in The Music is Black: A British Story at V&A East until January 2027. In July Falmouth University made him an honorary fellow, and in October Thaddaeus Ropac announced that it now represents him.

The next test comes in June 2027, when Ropac opens his first solo exhibition with the gallery in London and The Box in Plymouth launches a survey of five decades of his paintings and drawings. Together they will be the fullest account yet of a career that was never interrupted, only unwatched. “You have to paint something that means something to you,” Forrester has said. On the evidence of five decades of work, he has never painted anything else.

Tags: art, artists, Peter Doig, Thaddaeus Ropac, Denzil Forrester, Black British art