A new exhibition in London, tangentially interesting to the readers of this blog:
(In the picture, one of the pieces that can be seen at the exhibition: Celia Paul,
Charlotte, 2019, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 20.5cm. Website:
Victoria Miro)
Curated by Hilton Als
12 September through 22 November 2025
Michael Werner, 22 Upper Brook St, London W1K 7PZ, United Kingdom
Conceived as a collective portrait of Jean Rhys, including paintings, drawings, and books, Postures explores not only the destabilising force of difference, but the ways in which Empire affected the Creole world Rhys was born into, and never forgot. As a significant presence in post-colonial writing, Rhys offered, in sui generis prose, a view into lives and cultures that had hitherto been marginalised, or ignored, by European male writers. So doing, Rhys’ powerful evocation of her native Dominica, and Jamaica in her master work, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, inspired writers Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, and Caryl Phillips - all of whom are represented in Postures - to write about their own relationship to the places in the Caribbean where they were born and partly raised.
Working in tandem with Rhys’ texts, the artists included in Postures explore the interior and exterior worlds Rhys evoked with her pen: a world in which politics is not inseparable from the ways in which women live their lives.
Spanning over 30 artists, the exhibition features a potent mix of names past and present: Kai Althoff, Hurvin Anderson, Kara Walker, Celia Paul, Gwen John, Sarah Lucas, Leon Kossoff and Francis Picabia, to name just a few. There’s a deep sensuality in Reggie Burrows Hodges and the barbed wit of Rebecca Warren are visual echoes of the Caribbean’s colonial past from Agostino Brunias, and 20th-century photography from the likes of Brassaï and Eugène Atget.
What ties it all together? Rhys herself. Or rather, the idea of Rhys – a woman born in 1890 in Roseau, Dominica, to a Welsh father and a third-generation Creole mother of Scottish descent. She left the Caribbean in 1907, lived across Europe, and yet never truly left Dominica behind. It bled into her fiction – most famously into Wide Sargasso Sea, her lush and lacerating response to Jane Eyre. That novel alone influenced generations of writers, including Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott and Caryl Phillips – all of whom are referenced in the show. (Emily Phillips)
As it happened, the author had already started work on a text at that point called The First Mrs Rochester. She had read Jane Eyre and was shocked by Charlotte Brontë’s portrayal of Rochester’s ‘mad wife’. She sold the novel in 1957 for a measly £25, but did not complete Wide Sargasso Sea until 1966. Undoubtedly her most famous book, it offers an origin story for the young Antoinette Cosway, who is married off in Jamaica and renamed by her husband, before being transported to England, locked away and declared insane. Rochester’s cruelty is motivated by the racist belief that, as a Creole woman, she is bestial and highly sexed. Since publication, it has been heralded as a feminist and post-colonial text, as well as a beautiful work of literature. (Zoe Guttenplan)
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