Three Women is a new artwork for Brixton Underground station by renowned British artist and Turner Prize 2024 nominee, Claudette Johnson.
Johnson works primarily in large-scale drawings, using a range of media, from gouache and watercolour to oil pastel and pencil. Addressing the personal as political and challenging harmful stereotypes of representation through figuration and gesture, Johnson’s work gives space and power to the presence of Black women and men and offers a mediation on shared humanity.
Johnson’s first public artwork, Three Women, is a new triptych of Black female figures. The work references Trilogy, a three-part work Johnson made in the 1980s of three standing female figures. In Three Women, the sitters’ positions share a resonance with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting has been a critical point of return for Johnson, both for its formal accomplishments and its problematic and fractured engagement with African art and the female form. Encountering the work for the first time as a student was formative for Johnson, evoking questions about how she might locate herself in her work, and as a Black woman confronting the denials and distortions of Western art history.
With Three Women, Johnson returns to these questions. Depicted in monumental form for Brixton Underground station, the three figures reach beyond the edges of the composition, interrupting homogenised understandings of art and claiming space and power for Black women in the public realm.
Claudette Johnson, said: “Three Women was inspired by an earlier work, Trilogy 1982-86, which depicts three standing figures adopting poses that reflect their way of being in the world. In Three Women, I have loosely referenced Picasso’s 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon by having the sitters adopt seated poses that reflect those of some of ‘les demoiselles’. I am fascinated by the power that emanates from these postures and this is borne from my longstanding interest in women, power and how we claim space in places where we have been absent, obscured, caricatured or denied.”
