“Send in the Clowns,” Khalif Tahir Thompson’s debut with Victoria Miro this October, ranks among the most anticipated shows opening around Frieze London this year. A Yale MFA graduate based in Brooklyn, Thompson has attracted collector and institutional attention for his distinctive approach to portraiture, particularly the way it expands into, and is mirrored by, constructed psychological environments. Beginning with family archival material and intimate portrayals of domestic everyday life, his work has gradually turned toward the layered, entangled forces at play in the lives of individuals and families within a particular neighborhood and, more broadly, within the complex, sprawling urban environment of New York.
Observer met the artist at his Bushwick loft studio before the works traveled to London; he described them as a further evolution of a practice he has been developing over several years. “I started working with family imagery from the family archive. I did a lot of interiors and domestic spaces,” Thompson said. “For this show, I was really interested in bringing in more current lives and current scenes.”
“Send in the Clowns“
Artist: Khalif Tahir Thompson
Venue: Victoria Miro
Address: 16 Wharf Road, London
Through: November 7, 2026
A turning point in his practice came after his grandmother’s death, when he found boxes of photo albums that had sat in storage for 16 years, which he has called a visual “gold mine.” Collectively, they also told the history of communities often excluded from mainstream media narratives—a portal into the evolution of Black life in the city, and Brooklyn life more generally, over recent decades. With “Send in the Clowns,” Thompson stages a compelling dialectical encounter, bringing the archive into contact with present-day Brooklyn and the scenes he encounters now, as if trying to track a way of life that has vanished and, in a city like New York, always moving fast and moving on, left very few traces.
The idea to create a show about home, Brooklyn and his return to New York took shape after Thompson finished graduate school and left New Haven following the pandemic. The density and pace of the city made a strong impression on himm inspiring this new series. “I am from Canarsie,” he explained. “I went back home and to different places that I connected with growing up: the murals, the hair salon and the diner. I took references and then collaged them when I got back here. A lot of these outdoor scenes were built that way.”
There is something almost anthropological, even Situationist, in this attempt to chart, in a deeply personal and emotional way, a topography of these places. In this body of work, Thompson oscillates between the personal and the collective—the family archive and popular culture—as if contemplating how individuals are shaped as much by where they come from as by the environments through which they move and through the mysterious accumulation of meanings, messages and impressions absorbed as one’s social circle widens. The results are vibrant portrayals of urban life, closely attuned to the eclectic, multicultural character of the deep Brooklyn he grew up in and to the richness of Black cultural expression in the mundane spheres of life: random urban traces, in advertisements and in a culture that is written anew every day across the city’s busy streets.
Drawing on a Y2K Black American aesthetic, Thompson builds his paintings in layers rather than from a rigid preliminary drawing, creating scenarios that move between his Brooklyn childhood and the present. For this show, he thought deliberately about different times of day and kinds of weather. Outdoor scenes shift among ultramarines, phthalo greens, cloudy light and rainy atmospheres while capturing the moment when a scene feels suspended, just about to unfold, as in a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph or a film still. “I wanted to mix it up and create a real cinematic feel, bringing together my interests, my background, my family relationships, my personal relationships and my ideas on art and putting them all together,” Thompson said.
His technique lends itself to translating this gradual accumulation of elements and layers into material form, the collage that ultimately makes up our identities. Thompson learned papermaking early in his training, then collaged with paper he produced and later integrated those materials into painting. Newsprint and the work of Romare Bearden and Kerry James Marshall became important references, particularly for the history of text and collage within Black figuration.
Each image is built from an accumulation of paper, paint and other materials that give the composition texture and depth. Pieces of paper work alongside paint as structural and spatial elements, heightening the tension between their gritty physicality and the lightness or openness of the painted scene.
“When I am working with a painting, I am also thinking about position, texture and weight. Because it is a physical object, I like to create depth where certain materials come forward and what is painted recedes, and just play around with that,” Thompson said. The material quality of these pictures reminds us that the “memory” of the places we are looking at has itself been physically and psychologically reconstructed, recombining fragments and traces meaningful enough to evoke something now gone.
Color carries an emotional and psychological charge that links his work to French Fauvism and German Expressionism. A recent Paris exhibition led him back to the use of color in these movements, Thompson noted, reinforcing his interest in painters who use chromatic intensity to generate emotional or spiritual force. The Harlem Renaissance is another touchstone, both for the role of collage in Black image-making and for its broader project of reclaiming the right to picture Black modern life and finding forms capable of truly reflecting its culture.
Thompson singled out Beauford Delaney as one of his favorite artists for his use of color to create something beyond description, a spiritual intensity and synthetic sensibility close in spirit to Fauvism: “He used a lot of bold color in his figures, cityscapes and landscapes, almost like Van Gogh, bringing a certain liveliness or a spiritual aspect, through color. It creates this tension between a physical and a spiritual space.”
Thompson is especially interested in how visual languages migrate through exchange, reinterpretation and reinvention, as artists seek a language capable of documenting and expressing the new energy of urban, modern life. Matisse and Derain radicalized color in France; German Expressionism pushed it toward psychological intensity. Black American painters absorbed, transformed and repurposed aspects of those languages under entirely different cultural conditions. A century later, Thompson picks up that lineage. “I like the art-historical aspect of all these different things happening—conversations in different parts of the world, why they are being had and the different atmosphere of the city,” he said.
Thompson came to art history only later in life. Although he grew up in a creative family, his visual vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility were first shaped by the streets of his neighborhood and the places he frequented. “A lot of the storytelling, my attraction to the family archive and my interest in portraiture have to do with what was embedded in my upbringing,” he reflected. “There were all different places where you could see art. There was so much muraling where I grew up, just in my neighborhood. That always inspired my interest in portraiture. By representing this hair salon, I am already thinking about culture and cultural expression.” Heads gathered in one work form a portrait of an entire community’s rich cultural and identity expression.
The letters scattered across Thompson’s surfaces evoke the accumulation of messages and meanings—what he calls “visual noise,” the cacophony that builds in public space through the miscommunication and misunderstanding produced when different cultural expressions coexist. “They do not spell anything,” he explained. “They are moments of play. People like to decode them, which is interesting because it strategically makes people look at something longer due to its oddity.”
For Thompson, the disruption of any direct, linear reading turns the images into broader commentary: “It is not merely a representation of the archival images or the figures themselves. It is also a commentary on language, on the lexicon of different artistic languages and histories. It displaces the images in a way and creates an atmosphere.”
Empathy remains at the core of the project: Thompson wants the paintings to stay specific to his own family, neighborhood and cultural experience while creating a point of connection for viewers whose backgrounds may be very different. He described the show as a love letter to his younger self, to his journey as an artist and to Brooklyn. Still, he said, “I think the spirit of the show exists there beyond just my personal relationship to these spaces.”
The title, “Send in the Clowns,” comes from the 1973 ballad by Stephen Sondheim, famously sung by jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan: a powerful metaphor for bringing in comic relief or distraction when a plan fails or a situation turns chaotic. “For me, it resonates deeply: it reflects the layered facets of my life and experiences, the ways we deploy humor to mask vulnerability, and it speaks to how I respond to tragedy,” Thompson said.