The Hayward Gallery will present Mickalene Thomas: All About Love as the pioneering artist’s first solo presentation in a UK public art gallery from 11 February to 5 May 2025. Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, widely renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds embellished with rhinestones. As an artist who fearlessly transcends creative boundaries, her artworks have also adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and emblazoned fashion runways (Dior, 2023).

Thomas has redefined beauty and identity through her vibrant and dynamic compositions. Her work, characterised by a unique blend of colour, pattern, and subject matter, challenges societal norms and provides a powerful counter-narrative to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity.

The exhibition’s title, All About Love, reflects the artist’s expansive and empowering definition of the term love – encompassing family love, self-love and romantic love. On this, Thomas says: ‘my gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women’. Throughout her work, Thomas draws on the tenets of Black feminist theory in writing by authors and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Collins and bell hooks, to whose internationally acclaimed 2000 book All About Love: New Visions the exhibition title pays homage. 

All About Love will showcase Thomas’s extensive practice across painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. Visitors will be introduced to Thomas’s unique visual language developed in work across the last two decades. They will experience her myriad influences, ranging from 19th-century European ‘masters’ like Courbet, Ingres, Manet and Monet, to the fashion and interior design of 1970s America to present day social political events.