After lauded outings in LA and Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas arrives at the Hayward Gallery with a roar. It’s the roar of a wrestler’s body-slam or a diva’s ovation – throaty, triumphant, immoderate. Thomas’s exhibition is all that, and glamorous too, opening with a room of monumental portraits of black women. All are painted on panels with rounded corners – no frame is enclosing these women.
Working from staged photographs and found images, Thomas’s compositions are hymns to excess. Figures emerge in fragments from layers of pattern, like the swirling kimonos that unfurl to reveal body parts in Japanese woodcuts. The bodies themselves are radically flattened, rendered in simplified graphic forms like Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes of the 1960s. Yet unlike those nudes, Thomas’s figures have names, and eyes, and agency. Posed naked on a couch covered in florals and animal prints, the woman in A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) is identified as the artist’s ex-girlfriend Maya.
In navigating the territory between joy and sorrow, Thomas has two great weapons at her disposal: rhinestones and Eartha Kitt. A liberal crusting of the former gives these flat paintings depth and movement. In Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, violet and indigo highlights sparkle from the artist’s mother’s rhinestone afro. Her smile radiates with such a shimmer you can barely focus. A recent painting of a medical student called Din dances before your eyes in iridescent starbursts.
Thomas reflects on the way black women have been pictured – or not. Tucked in the margins of historical paintings, naked and available as “exotic” objects of desire, occupying their accepted roles as performers. Rhinestones were created to dazzle under electric light and create spectacle on stage. They dress bodies that move for pleasure and entertainment. In applying them to a fixed surface, Thomas makes the viewer do the work. The women in her paintings are going nowhere. We have to move to make them sparkle.
Two devastating works are soundtracked by Eartha Kitt. In Me as Muse (2016), a bank of TV screens flickers between patterns and body parts, slowly revealing the reclining nude form of Thomas herself. The audio is a BBC interview in which Kitt describes being cast out of her family, her early years of service and abuse, and the love that evaded her: “There were plenty of men who wanted to lay me down, but none who wanted to raise me up.”
In an adjacent gallery, four screens show Kitt singing Angelitos Negros alongside Thomas and two other women, styled and filmed as though all were performing in the 1960s. Their voices implore an artist to paint black angels into a church interior and break the customary depiction of heaven as a literal zone of white supremacy. Kitt weeps as she sings. Thomas, the painter, accepts her challenge, filling the gallery with exalted figures.
This exhibition borrows its title from American scholar bell hooks’ all about love (1999), which argues for the importance of love, whether sacred, familial, social or romantic. Taking over the Hayward with domestic furnishings, disco music, shrines filled with favourite books and even shag carpeting, Thomas makes space for intimacy of all kinds. For hooks, the invitation to cherish love had a political imperative: “I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood.” It’s a sentiment that has become more poignant 25 years after it was written.
Danger Came Smiling, an exhibition by Linder, the scalpel-wielding post-punk queen of photocollage, runs concurrently. The juxtaposition is superficially odd: Thomas is glitzy exuberance; Linder, surgical cool. Thomas is monumental. Linder is often confined to the dimensions of the magazine from which she slices imagery. Yet the pairing proves surprisingly canny. Both artists are involved in dissecting the feminine image. Both work with soft-porn and fashion photographs. Both use their own body – Linder flexes her back muscles and dons a boxer’s breastplate; Thomas appears in a tiger-print leotard performing wrestling manoeuvres.
Like Thomas, Linder’s work is often collaborative, and the importance of friendships and familial connections is evident, whether she is designing album covers for pals or photographing them backstage. A suite of works in which ballet positions are disrupted by strange undersea creatures was made, Linder notes, while she was caring for her elderly parents. Self-portraits in which she appears covered in coloured goo relate not only to a fetish known as “sploshing” but also to the soft foods with which elderly people can be spoon-fed.
The best works here are a deceptively simple marriage of two impeccably matched elements. A woman leaning to embrace a man instead jams a fork into her eye. A “perfect” Aryan athlete transforms into a piece of industrial furniture. Nudes airbrushed to marmoreal smoothness sprout crystal protuberances. This is work of tremendous restraint. The results are frequently brutal.
• Mickalene Thomas: All About Love and Linder: Danger Came Smiling are at the Hayward Gallery, London until 5 May
