Somaya Critchlow Puts Black Nudes Among Old Masters

When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a sofa. When the teacher likened it to the glam-realist style of David Hockney, Critchlow was taken aback.

“This sucks,” she recalled thinking. “That’s not what I want to paint.”

Critchlow was developing a deep affinity for the naked form at the time. But that felt at odds with everything she was learning at art school about conceptual art, and everything her feminist mother had taught her about female objectification.

For Critchlow, 31, the shift that happened when modernism took over as the dominant form of artistic expression never resonated. She likes her paintings old — Renaissance era, to be specific. Even Matisse’s poetic “Blue Nudes” series, for example, is not her cup of tea. (“No disrespect to Matisse,” she said.)

This is perhaps why Dulwich Picture Gallery, a London museum known for its collection of over 600 old master paintings, is the perfect place for Critchlow’s debut at a major British institution. Her exhibition, “The Chamber,” running through July 20, is part of the museum’s “Unlocking Painting” program, which puts contemporary painters in dialogue with the works it owns.

Lucy West, a Dulwich Picture Gallery curator who worked on Critchlow’s show, said, “Somaya had so many factors that made her the perfect fit. She grew up close to Dulwich Picture Gallery, so she was a regular visitor as a child. Also, she is a painter who has been endlessly fascinated by the old masters.”

The display features six newly commissioned paintings, all of naked Black women, a signature subject for Critchlow.

The artist said that she was fascinated by the idea of a chamber as a personal room but also a public space. The exhibition title takes its cue from Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” a collection of short stories published in 1979. In the title story, a young pianist marries an aristocrat, then later discovers his collection of sadistic pornography and a torture chamber containing the bodies of his three previous wives. Crtichlow said she had long been fascinated by the way in which Carter used volatile stories to explore ideas about “women with agency.”

Her works were also influenced by Walter Sickert’s 1910 essay “The Naked and the Nude,” Chritchlow said, which draws a distinction between these two states — the former being an art historical trope, and the latter being an intimate expression of the human form.

In one Critchlow painting, a woman perches on a chair, looking backward over her shoulder, with her exposed buttocks as the viewer’s focal point. In another, a woman cups her breasts while looking in the mirror.

Critchlow said she had been apprehensive about displaying her mischievous nudes in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s grand spaces, but when she spoke to the curators about it, “They were just like, ‘Oh, we didn’t even think about it because we’re surrounded by nudes all day in here,’” she said. “This show really just allowed me to embrace that storytelling and narratives is a big thing.”

She added that she was influenced by the religious stories and myths in works by Peter Paul Rubens and Gerrit Dou, which are displayed alongside her work in the show. She studied those paintings, and others from the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection, while preparing for the commission, she said.

“I got really fixated on oil paint,” she said. “I ended up doing a lot of research into Goya’s palette, Titian’s palette, Velázquez’s palette.”

In the last five years, Critchlow’s nude figures rendered in rich earthy tones have attracted attention and acclaim. Her work has been acquired by major museums in Europe and the United States, including the British Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

She started out showing with the New York galleries Fortnight Institute and Efraín López, and had her first British solo show in 2020, at Maximillian William, the London gallery that now represents her. But that show was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and ending up opening in the summer.

“During that time, everything happened with George Floyd, and this moment erupted,” she said. “My first solo show in London just opened bang in the middle of all that going on.”

With Black Lives Matter driving the news agenda, there was a surge of interest in the work of Black painters, including her own, Critchlow said. “It put me on the defensive about being included in shows about Blackness. My fears of being reduced were being played out in front of me.”

It wasn’t that she believed these shows weren’t necessary, she said, but the haste with which institutions rushed to acquire and showcase work by Black artists “felt like a trend,” she added. “It didn’t feel authentic.”

Easy readings of Critchlow’s paintings might throw up buzzwords like reclamation or body positivity, but Critchlow said her work was about neither. “Because of the politics around being Black and being a woman,” she said, there’s some need to see it “from a purely positive positioning — this need for it to be pure and good.”

Look closely enough, and you’ll see that there’s a sinister quality to her paintings — a dark humor and absurdity in the way that, at times, the women appear just as menacing as they are beautiful.

There are of course erotic undertones in her work, too. Her figures appear in tantalizing positions, with captivated gazes inspired by Black porn magazines from the 1960s and ’70s.

Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic who recently curated an exhibition of Critchlow’s drawings at Maximillian William called “Triple Threat,” is a longtime champion of her work. In an essay for her first solo show at a U.S. institution, at the Flag Art Foundation in 2023, he wrote that “Critchlow’s figures are forceful entities, often alive in their pleasure and the pleasure of being looked at.”

What’s clear is that these women are not being voyeuristically observed nor deliberately seductive, but are participants in the act of being seen. “I paint these women,” Critchlow said, “but I never feel like they’re complacent”

Instead, her paintings seem to be about making the private public, and rebelling against ideas of purity to explore dark curiosities about the body.

Critchlow said that lately, she had been thinking about why Velázquez — the 17th-century Spanish artist with some masterpieces in the Dulwich Picture Gallery collection — didn’t paint more conventionally attractive people. “He looked at the dwarfs in the court,” she said, “with as much lust and intrigue” as people expect a painter to find in “more beautiful women.”

“Sometimes, in order to understand something,” she said, “you almost need to go where it’s off limits.”