Eugene Palmer was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955, moving to Birmingham, England in 1966 to reunite with his parents, who had moved there in search of better job opportunities. Studying at Wimbledon School of Art and Goldsmiths College School of Art, Palmer is best known for his portraits of the Black community, especially women, addressing issues of race, identity, cultural history and representation.
Painter Eugene Palmer was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1955, where he lived with his aunt and cousins, prior to moving to Birmingham, England in 1966 to reunite with his parents, who had immigrated in search of better job opportunities. Palmer recalled his airplane journey to England as a traumatic experience (Considering Art Podcast). Art historian Petrine Archer-Straw suggested a parallel with the forced migration of slavery, with journeys like Palmer’s representing a kind of ‘second crossing’ of the Atlantic (Archer-Straw 1993, p.10).
Palmer attended an Art Foundation course at Sutton Coldfield College in Birmingham (1974–75). He subsequently earned his BA from Wimbledon School of Art (1975–8), before obtaining a teaching certificate from Garnett College (1982–83) and his MA from Goldsmiths College (1983–5). During this time, he produced abstract-expressionist work while continuing to make figurative drawings from life. Although not formally a member, Palmer was closely associated with the BLK art group, founded in 1979 and whose members included Eddie Chambers, Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce. He showed twice at the New Contemporaries group exhibitions in the 1970s and later at the Whitechapel Open at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1988. Rooted in his experience of being immersed in British culture while remaining symbolically outside of it due to the colour of his skin, Palmer’s work addresses issues of race, identity, cultural history and representation. Shifting from abstract to figurative, his work has included portraits investigating the Black presence in a number of contexts, including in portrait photography and in Western art history. His practice also deals with making reproductions of the same sitter, each showing different variations, for examples in skin tone, either painted in shades of grey, or in full colour. By producing nearly identical portraits, displayed as multiples, Palmer invites the viewers to reflect on constructions of identity and the politics of beauty in relation to ethnicity and skin tone. He also investigates the complexities of ‘colourism’, particularly as regards the visual narrative by European artists who created stereotyped representations of Black women over many centuries.
In the early 1990s, Palmer produced an innovative series of paintings in which he placed Black figures into classical rural landscapes to challenge notions of Englishness and reflect on the problematic relation of Black people with tradition, as exemplified by Duppy Shadow (1994, Wolverhampton Art Gallery). In this and other portraits, Palmer employed a classically-derived aesthetic, depicting his figures using a scale, posture and composition typical of the grand portraits commissioned by leading patrons within the clergy, aristocracy or royalty. Some figures are not at ease in these verdant landscapes, while others express dignity and self-confidence. Eddie Chambers noted that Palmer is able to give his ‘portraits an ambiguous yet pronounced dignity and status that cannot help but have fascinating social readings. […] Appearing in multiple form, the paintings challenge us to engage with Palmer's questioning of difference, sameness, history and identity’ (Chambers 2000). Inspired by African-American photographer Richard Samuel Roberts, who took portraits of affluent, rather than stereotypical Black people in the Southern States, Palmer painted Wanted to Say I in 1997 (New Art Gallery Walsall collection). The work showed a Black woman looking through a porthole or the hull of a ship, evoking ideas of the journey and the middle-passage, a symbolic space ‘that most Black people at some stage […] will place themselves mentally in’ (Considering Art Podcast). Palmer created a sense of selfhood and history across time, exploring slave heritage but also looking at this symbolic space in an optimistic way, creating an image of endurance, aspiration and resilience. As noted by Carol Ann Dixon, Palmer’s centrality of Blackness and his decision to create positive representations of Black women ‘could be interpreted as his deliberate attempt at challenging and ‘counter-imaging’ past histories of marginalisation, distortion and negative stereotyping of African-descended women within fine art’ (Dixon 2018). As Archer-Straw observed, there is also an element of the pathetic which defied Palmer’s own tendency toward 'heroising': ‘His blacks, while dominating the canvas are also constrained by it. […] their bodies […] hover in an ambivalent manner which suggests both a coming and going. It is their sense of instability, that 'the center cannot hold', which truly pushes Eugene's work into the arena of a new kind of grand narrative, 'an other story' (Archer-Straw database).
Palmer’s first solo exhibition was held at Bedford Hill Gallery, London in 1988. Since then, he has exhibited widely in the UK, including at Wolverhampton Art Gallery (1996), Duncan Campbell Contemporary (2000) and, more recently, at James Hockey Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham (2018). His work also featured in Unexpected: Continuing Narratives of Identity and Migration at Ben Uri Gallery (2016). Eugene Palmer’s work is represented in UK public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and New Art Gallery Walsall.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eugene Palmer]
Publications related to [Eugene Palmer] in the Ben Uri Library