I enjoyed seeing Mickalene Thomas’s joyful exuberant paintings at the Pop Forever. Tom Wesselman & … exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and at When We See Us at the Kunstmuseum Basel. So when I read that she would have a solo show at London’s Hayward Gallery I immediately added it to my list.
Mickalene Thomas’s lavish mixed-media paintings are a celebration of joy and Black Identity. Her monumental portraits of black women are painted in bold colours and sometimes adorned with sparkling rhinestones. Her models all look glamorous and self-assured if not outright triumphant. Thomas frequently uses collage as a compositional technique, which makes her work look fresh. Many of her panels have rounded corners, a significant detail that is easily overlooked.
Some of Thomas’s works reinterpret iconic scenes from European art history, such as “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe” (1862) by Édouard Manet and “Le Sommeil” (1866) by Gustave Courbet, as a way of reinserting Black women into art history. I get the point but I have now seen it a bit too often.
The exhibition borrows its title from a book by the American academic and social and political activist bell hooks, all about love. new visions (1999), in which she emphasizes the importance of experiencing different kinds of love, parental love, romantic love, communal love and so on. This is probably why Thomas has recreated two domestic scenes complete with carpets, furniture and 1970s disco.
One of my favorite works in the show is from a recent series of paintings, which explore anger rather than love, centering on Civil Rights activism in the United States from the 1960s to the present. “Guernica Detail (Resist #7) (2021) is an intricate collage of U.S. Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter protests overlaid with fragments from Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) showing echoes from the past in the present. But perhaps the paintings elsewhere in the show exhibiting pleasure and joy are the most powerful form of protest.
Even though there were some rooms that I merely glossed over and even though not all works are as strong, Mickalene Thomas has created a signature style and that itself is a form of praise in today's contemporary art world.
Mickalene Thomas. All About Love is at the Hayward Gallery in London until 5 May 2025.