Amy Sherald has a thing: a specific, defined, distinct look and aesthetic that’s uniquely her own. She paints Black figures on flat planes of colour, their skin stark and monochrome, their clothes bold and bright. Immediately recognisable, instantly Amy Sherald.
And after century upon century of figurative painting, carving out a USP is a pretty rare thing. It's made her a huge name, got her the gig to paint Michelle Obama's official portrait, and now she’s over here with her first UK show.
And it’s exactly what you expect. A woman in a spotted coat stands against a field of pure pink, a boy in a sports sweater against a smear of green, a girl in jeans against a world of lilac, two sailors are locked in an embrace on a canvas of lushest sky blue.
All that cool emotionlessness gets replaced with freakin’ dirt bikes.
Most of the sitters – except the sailors – stare out at you directly, not defiantly or aggressively, but with total calm and confidence, as if they’re exactly where they’re meant to be. Their skin is flat and grey, explosions of colour are saved for their clothes, all painted with hyper-real, cool attention, like a modern Tissot, with nods to Barkley Hendricks and Alex Katz.
They’re intentionally everyday images: portraits of Black Americans, pure and simple, no extra weight or intention, because that should be enough, because painting a portrait of a Black person can still be a radical act.
They’re very pretty paintings, but they’re also a little cold, a little austere. Way more exciting is the work in the next space, because all that cool emotionlessness gets replaced with freakin’ dirt bikes. The two main canvases, a neat diptych, feature Black men popping wheelies on rearing machines. They’re weird, bright things, like old portraits of generals on horseback, or a George Stubbs painting, but all transferred to the streets of Baltimore. They’re great, and say loads more, way more quickly, than the straight up portraits.
They’re flanked by an image of a kid on a slide on one side, and a man on a tractor on the other - unabashed, unadulterated, everyday Americana, but with Black people as the focus.
What’s amazing is how detailed and alive the non-organic aspects of the paintings are: the slick gleam of a metal slide, the super-precise lines and primary boldness of a motorbike, the grease in a tractor engine, the sharp shadows on a wheel. Beyond the outfits and the fabric and the portraits of celebrities, Sherald is actually just a very, very good painter.
They feel like stills from a congressional campaign video: hopeful, blue skied, aspirational – it’s Sherald reclaiming all this iconography for African Americans, for the the people on whose slave labour the nation was built. That’s what makes them special as works of art, their conceptual grounding, but it also makes them incredibly inward-looking.
