LONDON.- Over more than four decades, Denzil Forrester (b. 1956) has developed a painting practice rooted in the vital sounds and energy of London’s dub and reggae scene in the early 1980s, giving form to rhythm, movement and emotion through line and colour. Translating music techniques of sampling, mixing and looping into visual terms, he creates bold, dynamic compositions that are rooted in tradition while remaining distinctly his own.

I have long admired Denzil’s work. Just as his artistic forebears drew from the scenes of music and nightlife, he too has an outstanding ability to distil atmospheric energy, movement, together with communal emotions of joy, longing or fear. His paintings are among the most enthralling and distinctive of his generation, and having shown Denzil’s work in our group exhibition Artists I Steal From, curated by Alvaro Barrington in 2019, we are excited to now represent him. — Thaddaeus Ropac

The gallery announced that the first solo exhibition of Forrester’s work will be in London in June 2027, coinciding with the opening of a survey exhibition at UK Art Fund Museum of the Year, The Box, Plymouth, of paintings and drawings made over the course of the past five decades. His work is currently on view in The Music is Black: A British Story at V&A East Museum, London (until January 2027), and was recently included in the Backyard Biennial: East at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2026).





A revelation for me has been seeing the recent work coming out of Denzil’s studio. It has a subtlety and form that perhaps comes about because he is reflecting upon his past. These new paintings are dreamlike and emerge as much from his imagination as from his studies of real life. — Peter Doig

Forrester’s draughtsmanship and commitment to the act of painting reveals his deep immersion in art history and the work of painters as wide-ranging as Giotto, Goya, Caravaggio, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, Cézanne, Picasso and the French Impressionists. As poet and painter John Lyons has written, ‘Denzil’s respect for tradition is a manifestation of the will to find an identity within two cultures, Afro-Caribbean and European, for both have played a vital role in his process of maturing as an artist.’

Most of my contemporaries at art school were interested in North American abstract expressionism, but I knew that I had to find something that shook me up and stirred me from within. In the 1980s, I began drawing in nightclubs like Phebes in Dalston, because I realised that Monet’s waterlilies and Van Gogh’s landscapes were motivated by something simple: painting itself. You have to paint something that means something to you. — Denzil Forrester

Exploring the nightclub as a container for ecstatic joy, music and expression, but also melancholy and homesickness, his paintings reflect the duality of London’s social and cultural landscape that existed alongside the racial tensions and police violence of the 1980s. The artist’s rich, saturated palettes respond to his environments and the places he has lived: Grenada’s sun-drenched landscape of his childhood until he moved to London in 1967; Rome, where he completed a residency at the British School in 1983–85, absorbing from the city and its wealth of fine art an appreciation for pure, crisp light; the clear light and atmosphere in Cornwall, where Forrester relocated in 2016 and now lives and works.

To experience the vibrant sights and sounds lived by Forrester is to celebrate his remarkable artistic skill, acute powers of observation and rich compositional rhythm. — Sheena Wagstaff, curator