“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, 1977 © Paul Joyce / National Portrait Gallery, London. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery.
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, “Untitled”, 1949, printed ca. 1949 © The Estate of Hans Bellmer. Photo: Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery; Brett Goodroad “Untitled (After Dael)”, 2021-2022, Private Collection. © Brett Goodroad. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Zeshan Ahmed.
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 © ARCHIVIO GBB. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery
Top image: Hilton Als by Ali Smith © Hiton Als. Courtesy of Hilton Als and Michael Werner Gallery.
Photography courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery.
