In 2025, Whitechapel Gallery will present the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist Joy Gregory (b.1959), winner of the eighth annual Freelands Awards, and one of the most innovative artists working with photography today. Gregory has influenced generations of younger artists and played a critical role in the development of photography nationally and internationally since the early 1980s.
Since the 1980s, Gregory has been at the forefront of exploring the wider cultural politics of identity, race and gender, whilst also expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities and experimenting with the medium’s physical properties, from Victorian printing techniques to digital photography. Creating exquisite photographs that embrace the compelling beauty of the medium, Gregory’s work avoids an overtly critical approach in favour of drawing in her viewers by using aesthetic pleasure to trigger a response. She has described her practice as being political ‘with a small p, on the basis that you catch more flies with honey.’
The exhibition will be displayed across the galleries and will include over 100 works, made over her forty-year career and spanning analogue and digital photography, video, installation, performance and textiles, and addressing complex themes such as beauty, language endangerment, the transatlantic slave trade and the diasporic experience, often through the lens of her own experience as a child of Jamaican parents born in rural England.
The exhibition demonstrates Whitechapel Gallery’s dedication to support the work of women artists and artists of colour and the exhibition will offer audiences an intimate and in-depth opportunity to explore the full breadth and depth of Gregory’s work. The exhibition will include her delicate still life and interior photographs, her iconic early self-portraiture and later portraits, and series including Objects of Beauty (1992-1995), Memory & Skin (1998), Handbag Project (1998-2005), The Blonde (1995-1999), Cinderella Tours Europe (1997-2001) as well as film works such as Fairest (1995-2005), Gomera (2005-2010) and her poetic and haunting film installation Seeds of Empire (2021).
Gregory also will produce a newly commissioned work supported by the Freelands Foundation that explores the common threads that connect the communities in the Kalahari Desert with whom Gregory is currently working, and the experiences of the descendants of indigenous and enslaved people in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey has been generously supported by Freelands Foundation and Cockayne – Grants for the Arts: a donor advised fund held at The London Community Foundation. Research for this exhibition has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
