Déjà vu? You may feel you’ve seen the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition before. In a sense, you have.
There are 22 contemporary artists in curator Ekow Eshun’s celebration of “Black figuration”, The Time is Always Now. Many, of late, have been centre stage. Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Jennifer Packer: all, within the past three years, have had solo exhibitions at prominent public galleries. Some artworks in this show now feel almost as familiar to me as my own children. Black artists today aren’t marginalised. They’re mainstream.
Like 2022’s In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, which Eshun also curated, this exhibition, then, reflects the ascendancy of a new artistic establishment. Near the start, Thomas J Price’s 9ft-tall gleaming bronze statue of a gym bunny in Nike trainers with braids and a beatific expression stands proud, like a female superhero.
Sometimes, though, familiarity breeds admiration and respect – and so it proves here, if straightforward visual pleasure is your bag. Who could fail to be stirred by Kerry James Marshall’s crisp and confident panels, or three fiery, unforgettable paintings by Michael Armitage, colossal in scale and scope? One, brilliantly, quotes Titian while depicting a tear-gassed crowd.
Various tendencies may be discerned. Several artists “reclaim” the black figure as a glamorous subject, favouring spotless surfaces and sleek silhouettes. (An elegant painting – shown in London two years ago – of a soignée young woman with grey skin and coral fingernails, by Michelle Obama’s portraitist Amy Sherald, typifies this approach.) Others grapple with the canon of Western European painting. Stillness, melancholy, and a sort of dignified stylishness characterise the early stages.
