Ekow Eshun considers the Black figure in portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery is tracing the Black figure throughout portraiture with its spring exhibition, ‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’, with curator Ekow Eshun uniting works from 22 African diasporic artists working in the UK and US. 

In the first part of the exhibition, they consider identity and representation through the lens of African American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ 1903 theory, Double Consciousness, exploring the juxtaposition between how artists see themselves and how they are seen. Elsewhere, artists respond to the absence of the Black figure in historical archives, and address representations of Black gatherings. 

‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’

‘What is most striking is that there isn't a singular form with which the Black figure can really be depicted,’ Eshun says. ‘I was interested in the different ways that all these different artists approach this shared subject.’ From Claudette Johnson’s vast proportions, to Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s abstract features and Kimathi Donkor’s adoption of history paintings to create a new narrative, artwork here – all created from 2000 onwards – responds to the shift in the last century, which has seen the Black figure depicted by Black artists, rather than by European or Western ones. 

‘If there's one thing that unites artists, and quite diverse practices and aesthetics and viewpoints, it is their capacity to invite the viewer to move from looking at the Black figure – which is how Black figures have historically been depicted in Western art – to looking with or through the eyes of the artists or the subject in those pictures,’ Eshun adds. ‘This is a shift, and the shift therefore goes from an external gazing out to an internal subjective relationship, seen from the position of those artists and their subjects.’

‘The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure’, 22 February – 19 May 2024, the National Portrait Gallery, npg.org.uk