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DANIEL TESTER and ORLA McHALE survey the astonishing achievement of Donald Rodney, whose themes of racial injustice and institutional inequality are as relevant today as when he made them
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Donald Rodney
Spike Island, Bristol
SUMMER is not in the air at Spike Island, Bristol, where the gallery hosts a major retrospective of the trailblazing Birmingham artist, Donald Rodney. Rodney, as a short film included in the exhibition reveals, rarely saw the summer sunshine, as his lifelong condition of sickle cell anaemia usually left him hospitalised throughout the season.
Rodney’s struggle with his condition, which would lead to his tragically early death at 36 in 1998, informs much of his work, which is dark, painful and unsparing, seeming to anticipate and confront a death that hectored him all his life.
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