Thaddaeus Ropac Signs Denzil Forrester, the Painter Who Put London’s Dub Clubs on Canvas

Denzil Forrester has spent more than four decades painting the dance floor: the swaying bodies, the sound systems, the sirens outside. Now a major international gallery wants in. Thaddaeus Ropac has taken on the 70-year-old London painter, who joins the roster just ahead of Frieze Week, according to Artnet News and the gallery.

The match began with a single picture. Ropac told Artnet he fell for Forrester’s Knights of Dub (2005) when the artist Alvaro Barrington included it in Artists I Steal From, a group show Barrington curated at the dealer’s London gallery in 2019.

This picture really stayed on my mind.

Thaddaeus Ropac, speaking to Artnet News, Thaddaeus Ropac (Artnet News)

Ropac added that “only a great painter” could capture on canvas “the sounds and energy of London’s clubs.” Forrester arrived in London as a child in 1967 and began painting Black British life in the 1980s. He is best known for packed reggae and dub nights, but his work also captures the tension outside: Three Wicked Men (1982) and Death Walk (1983) take on the police and the 1981 Brixton Riots.

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His method is closer to a DJ’s than a portraitist’s. Forrester sketched inside clubs in quick four- to five-minute studies, the length of a record, then collaged those figures into big canvases, the gallery says, translating sampling, mixing and looping into paint. The rooms he drew were home to figures like Jah Shaka, the legendary Jamaican soundsystem operator.

In these clubs city life is recreated in essence; sounds, lights, police sirens, bodies pushing and swaying back and forth.

Denzil Forrester, Thaddaeus Ropac

For about 30 years, almost nobody saw it. Forrester taught drawing and painting at Morley College, and the breakthrough came in 2015, when Peter Doig emailed him. Doig gave him his first gallery show in two decades at Tramps in London in 2016. Solo museum shows followed at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021, then the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and ICA Miami in 2023.

At Frieze London, which runs Oct. 14 to 18, Ropac will hang two 2025 Forrester paintings in its booth, ARTnews reports. A solo show at the gallery follows next year. Forrester sees the paintings and the music as doing the same job. “People were expressing themselves in the music,” he says on the gallery’s site. “You didn’t have to have a band, you’d make music in the studio like making art, putting colours together.”