A new mural by renowned British artist and Turner Prize 2024 nominee Claudette Johnson has launched today (Friday 25 October) at Brixton Underground station as part of Transport for London’s (TfL) Art on the Underground programme.
Johnson’s first public artwork, Three Women, follows a changing series of murals installed at Brixton Underground station by artists including Denzil Forrester, Joy Labinjo and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, in recognition of the local murals painted in the area in the 1980s.
Three Women is a three-part artwork known as a triptych that features Black female figures referenced in one of her previous works, Trilogy 1982-86, which she created in the 1980s. The sitting positions of the Black female figures share a resonance with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting by Picasso, whose problematic and fractured engagement with African art and the female form marked shifts in Johnson’s early work, evoked questions about how she might locate herself in her work, and as a Black woman confront the denials and distortions of Western art history. With Three Women, Johnson returns to these questions with three subjects instilled with a self-possessed subjectivity that runs counter to the eroticised forms and colonial gaze of modernist art movements.
Johnson works primarily in large-scale drawings, using a range of media, from gouache and watercolour to oil, pastel and pencil. Often captured from life, Johnson’s figures are monolithic in scale, reaching to the edges of the frame and yet intimately encountered. Addressing the personal as political and challenging harmful stereotypes of representation through human figures and gesture, Johnson’s work gives space and power to the presence of Black people and offers a mediation on shared humanity.
Depicted in monumental form for Brixton Underground station, these figures reach beyond the composition, as though resisting the confines of the conventional frame and interrupting a homogenised understanding of African art and of the Black female figure.
Claudette Johnson, said: “Three Women was inspired by an earlier work, Trilogy 1982-86, which depicts three standing figures adopting poses that reflect their way of being in the world. In Three Women, I have loosely referenced Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon by having the sitters adopt seated poses that reflect those of some of ‘les demoiselles’. I am fascinated by the power that emanates from these postures and this is borne from my longstanding interest in women, power and how we claim space in places where we have been absent, obscured, caricatured or denied.”
