CLAUDETTE JOHNSON

Early Years

Born in 1959 in Manchester, Claudette Johnson’s parents were Caribbean migrants. Experiences growing up in a minority in Britain influenced aspects of her art, as did her reading of the writings of African American novelist Toni Morrison.

Following a foundation course in Art and Design at Manchester Polytechnic in 1978, Johnson studied Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton, graduating with a BA Hons in 1982. At Wolverhampton she joined the BLK Art group, comprising British artists of Caribbean descent who shared a desire to express the contemporary experience of being Black and British.

Johnson contemporaries from this formative BLK period included artists like Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Marlene Smith, Lubaina Himid, and Sonia Boyce.

In 1982 Johnson helped the group to organise the first national Black artists convention in Northhampton. She later co-founded the BLK Arts Research Group to revisit the groups legacy in 2011.

Claudette Johnson Artworks

Claudette Johnson’s art presents larger than life representations of mostly Black women and some men, sparsely rendered with pastels and brightly coloured gouache washes. Her representations of the Black female body purposely resist objectification.

Early Seminal work

In one of her seminal works on paper of the 1980s Untitled (1987), Johnson drew fellow artist and friend Brenda Agard, who was part of the same milieu of Black British women artists who often exhibited together during the 1980s.

The painting is divided into three bands, with each band presenting a different view of Agard: a pose of movement and dynamism in the centre is flanked by full frontal static representations of the sitter on either side. In each section of the work, Agard is rendered differently. On the right, a looser sparser application of black pastel against empty ground renders the face with tonality. At the other end of the spectrum, Agard’s skin is fully rendered in colour and set against a green wash background. In each instance the body is monolithic in proportion almost spilling off the edge of its otherwise confined space.

The unconventional arrangement reflects the source material for the work, a row of three photographic test strips arranged side by side. These decisions are not about the formal qualities of portraiture, but rather denying a singular objectifying view of Black women. As Johnson explained in 1990 ‘I’m not interested in portraiture or its tradition. I’m interested in giving space to Blackwomen presence.’

Standing Women

In the 1990s, the artist began to focus on more monochromatic nudes drawn on a large scale with pastels. In works such as Afterbirth (1990) and Untitled (Standing Woman) (1990), the artist expressively renders nude Black women whose demeanour and powerful poses, enhanced by scale, defy easy objectification, asserting their presence as individual woman, rather than objects of a male gaze.

Standing Figure with African Masks

In later works Johnson increasingly brought colour to her expressions of Black female identity. In Standing Figure with African Masks (2018), a monolithic pastel and gouache on paper work, Johnson presents in full colour her own rendition of Picasso‘s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

Producing her own version of the abstracted African mask wearing women, Johnson examines her artistic relationship with African art. In her painting the figure in the image, a confident Black woman in blue jeans and a red crop-top, looks down to the viewer.

Kind of Blue

Bright monochrome colour fields have come to dominate the background of Johnson’s works, at times playing on the idea of empty and full space.

In Kind of Blue (2020), Johnson renders in pastel the face of an adolescent boy from one of South African photographer Peter Magubane’s iconic photographs, against a blue colour field that occupies a large proportion of the canvas. Presenting the boy in a reclining position, the work also explores the compositional effect of a horizontal figure, while subverting the European representational trope of the reclining female body.

Exhibitions

Claudette Johnson has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions.

Solo exhibitions include Claudette Johnson: Still Here, Hollybush Gardens, London (2021); I Came to Dance, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2019); Claudette Johnson, Hollybush Gardens, London (2017); In This Skin, The Black Art Gallery, London, (1992); Pushing Against The Boundaries, Rochdale Art Gallery (1990); and Recent Works, The City Art Gallery Manchester (1986).

Group exhibitions include Am I Asking For Miracles Here?, The House of St. Barnabas, London (2021); The Place Is Here, South London Gallery, London (2017); The Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain, London (2012); Transforming The Crown, Caribbean Cultural Center, New York (1998); The Thin Black Line, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (1985); Black Women Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre, London,(1983); The Pan-Afrikan Connection, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Sheffield (1982).

Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021