After lauded outings in LA and Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas arrives at the Hayward Gallery with a roar. It’s the roar of a wrestler’s body-slam or a diva’s ovation – throaty, triumphant, immoderate. Thomas’s exhibition is all that, and glamorous too, opening with a room of monumental portraits of black women. All are painted on panels with rounded corners – no frame is enclosing these women.
Working from staged photographs and found images, Thomas’s compositions are hymns to excess. Figures emerge in fragments from layers of pattern, like the swirling kimonos that unfurl to reveal body parts in Japanese woodcuts. The bodies themselves are radically flattened, rendered in simplified graphic forms like Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes of the 1960s. Yet unlike those nudes, Thomas’s figures have names, and eyes, and agency. Posed naked on a couch covered in florals and animal prints, the woman in A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) is identified as the artist’s ex-girlfriend Maya.
