Claudette Johnson, First Monographic Exhibition

Woman, black, artist. In a word: Claudette Johnson. The English artist does not like to define herself by stereotypes of her but she is known to the British and international public as one of the most prominent figurative artists of her generation and an active member of the artistic collective Black British Arts Movement. For more than thirty years her recurring subjects have been human figures, women and men of color, intimate and powerful portraits represented in large-scale drawings. For Johnson, “blackness” is a fiction created by colonialism, and therefore the artist insists that this fiction can be interrupted by an encounter with the stories we must tell about ourselves. Johnson's subjects, by turns provocative and wary, funny and stimulating, represent the variety of stories that can be told, in the artist's words, by the presence of the black woman but which by staging her reveal the universality of her humanity.