All hail the new art at Brixton Tube station, revealed yesterday to press and commuters: the latest mural, titled Brixton Blue, comes courtesy of Denzil Forrester, the sixty-three-year-old, Grenada-born artist who moved to the East End as a child, and is now celebrated for his paintings of Hackney nightlife in the 1980s. Brixton Blue is the Truro-based artist’s first major public commission in the UK, and the mural is a reinterpretation of one of his best-known works, Three Wicked Men, which is now in Tate’s collection. The painting is emblematic of Forrester’s work in that it brings together two of his recurrent subjects: reggae dances and racial and social injustice. Forrester’s friend Winston Rose, who was mentally ill, died in a police van aged twenty-seven in 1981, after being restrained by officers. Rose’s death has shaped Forrester’s practice ever since. Three Wicked Men, created only the year after—in 1982—is a mournful painting as much as it is a celebratory one; a reminder that happiness and sadness are two sides of the same coin.
