The pioneering artist Mickalene Thomas’ new exhibition, All About Love opens at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre from 11 February to 5 May 2025. This is the first time the artist is presenting a solo exhibition in a UK public gallery. Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, and is widely renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds decorated with rhinestones. She is an artist who transcends creative boundaries. Her artwork has adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and featured on fashion runways (Dior, 2023).
Thomas explores the question of beauty and identity through her vibrant and dynamic compositions. Her work is characterised by a unique blend of colour, pattern, and subject matter, challenging societal norms and providing counter narratives to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity.
The exhibition’s title, All About Love, reflects the artist’s expansive and empowering definition of the term love – encompassing family love, self-love and romantic love. On this, Thomas says: ‘my gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women’. Throughout her work, Thomas draws on the principles of Black feminist theory in writing by authors and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Collins and bell hooks, to whose internationally acclaimed 2000 book All About Love: New Visions the exhibition title pays homage.
Thomas says about the exhibition: “I am incredibly grateful and excited to present All About Love in the cultural epicentre of the UK art community – the Hayward Gallery, which will be a key milestone in my career as an artist. This presentation uniquely navigates the nuances of my work while cohesively investigating notions and topics at the core of my artistic practice.”
For more information please go to; https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/mickalene-thomas-all-about-love/