Denzil Forrester valuation
Painted London's dub and reggae nights of the early 1980s from drawings made on the dance floor.
Denzil Forrester was born in Grenada in 1956 and came to London as a child.
What a work by Denzil Forrester is worth
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Bio
Denzil Forrester was born in Grenada in 1956 and came to London as a child. He studied at the Central School of Art from 1975 to 1979 and at the Royal College of Art from 1980 to 1983, and it was then, at night, that he made the work he is known for: drawings made in the dark in London's dub and reggae clubs, worked up in the studio into large paintings of dancers, sound systems, DJs and police, in hot colour and driving, diagonal rhythm. The paintings are among the most vivid records of Black British club culture of the period, and of its tensions with the police. He taught for many years at Morley College in London, moved to Truro in Cornwall in 2016, and has gone on painting the clubs and the street. He was made an MBE in 2020.
The large club paintings of the early 1980s are the core of his work; later paintings return to the same scenes, and there is a substantial body of drawings and works on paper, many of them made in the clubs. Stephen Friedman Gallery represents him, and the date of a work, which places it in or after the club years, matters as much as its subject.
Grenada, the Royal College and the dub clubs
A Rome Scholarship in 1983 was followed by a Harkness Fellowship that took him to New York from 1986 to 1988, and in 1987 he won the Korn/Ferry award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for Carnival Dub.
Tate holds his painting Three Wicked Men of 1982, and his work has also been shown at White Columns in New York.
Winston Rose, Islington and Brixton Blue
He first showed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1982, with Winston Rose and Winston Rose 2, paintings of a friend who had died in a police van, and Dub Charge followed there in 1983. He was in From Two Worlds at the Whitechapel in 1986, and in 1995 he organised The Caribbean Connection at the Islington Arts Factory, where he had his studio, with work by Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams, Frank Bowling, John Lyons and Bill Ming.
Peter Doig and Matthew Higgs curated From Trench Town to Porthtowan, a survey at the Jackson Foundation Gallery in Cornwall, in 2018, and the following year Art on the Underground commissioned Brixton Blue, his first major public work, for Brixton station, where it stayed for a year from September 2019. Julian Henriques made a documentary about him, Denzil's Dance. Morley College named a studio after him in 2021, and in July 2026 Falmouth University made him an Honorary Fellow. His paintings are in the Arts Council Collection, the Government Art Collection and the Harris Museum in Preston.
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