Khalif Tahir Thompson

Born in Brooklyn where he still lives and works, the large, vibrant canvases of Khalif Tahir Thompson (b.1995) invite us into the everyday lives of his sitters. Describing his work as ‘portraiture,’ many of Thompson’s paintings are inspired by family photograph albums chronicling his maternal grandparents’ journeys from the Deep South to the Northeast during the Great Migration. In the late 1980’s, Thompson’s grandmother won the lottery and moved to her dream home in Florida. Here, in her elaborately decorated interiors, she was visited by family, including the artist as a child, who later retrieved the boxes of photographs she took of her extended family over a 40-year period. In his paintings, Thompson constructs compositions using this cast of characters both as a homage to his family but also probing the psychology of human interaction. These are then re-framed and overlayed with imagined contemporary and cultural references that encourage us to consider notions of race, home and belonging, as well as- crucially - how identity is shared. The painting surface is also layered over time and paper and fabric collage applied to areas. Finally, Thompson punctuates the canvas with a rhythm of improvised numbers and letters that float Alice-in-Wonderland-style, that are intended, he says, ‘to disorientate…I don’t want the viewer to take the image for granted so it’s a way of directing the gaze.’