Family Living

Around the late 1990s, Denzil Forrester began to move away from his signature paintings of nightclubs, instead looking back to the time  he had arrived in England from Grenada in 1967. Aged eleven, he had had to wait six months before he could start school. During that period, he helped his mother sew bags in the basement of their Stoke Newington home late into the evening. In this painting, his childhood evenings blend with his nights (as a young man) in the basement clubs. The domestic scene of Singer sewing machines and tumble dryers is painted in a dancehall style. As Director of Nottingham Contemporary, Sam Thorne noted: ‘These works speak to the back-and-forth between house and club, birth family and elected family, private and public.’

Denzil Forrester's vibrant, colourful works immortalise the dynamic energy of the London reggae and dub nightclub scene during the early 1980s. Pulsating with rhythm, the artist's expressive depictions capture crowds of people moving in unison with the beat of the music. Flashes of vivid colour, gestural brushstrokes and frenetic compositions characterise his work.