“I’m just a memory, you understand?” Jean Rhys once wrote in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). But this autumn, she is very much present – resurrected not just in spirit, but in technicolour, ink and oil on canvas.
Opening September 12 and running until November 22 at London’s Michael Werner Gallery, Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World is the large-scale group exhibition curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als, and it’s everything you’d expect from the man whose literary eye is as razor-sharp as his curatorial sensibility. You might know him from his luminous tributes to Joan Didion at the Hammer Museum or James Baldwin at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.; now, he’s turned his gaze to Jean Rhys, the Dominican-born British writer who gave voice to exile, erasure and the psychological weather of being a woman.
Jean Rhys by Paul Joyce, 1977
Across paintings, photography, drawings and rare books, Postures asks what it means to live between identities, between continents and between the lines of a male-dominated canon.
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.
from left: Hans Bellmer, Brett Goodroad
Als is not here for biography-as-backdrop. Instead, he uses Rhys’ life and prose as an emotional and political architecture – an invitation to think about how empire, identity and art intersect. The show’s title, Postures, speaks to performance, to the ways women bend themselves around expectation. But it’s also about stance: how Rhys stood against literary norms, how her artistic descendants now do the same.
And like Rhys herself – often ignored in her lifetime, only to be rediscovered decades later – the exhibition is a quiet act of defiance.
Jean Rhys, ca. 1929
Photography courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery.
