Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and curator Hilton Als presents Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World, a large-scale group exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery, focusing on the Caribbean-born British author Jean Rhys (1890–1979). The exhibition not only explores Rhys’s texts but also her Creole roots, their fraught relationship with imperialism, and the political potential of her writing.
Rhys occupies a distinctive place in 20th-century literature with her voice that illuminated marginalized lives, postcolonial experiences, and the fragile existence of women. With Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), she brought the Caribbean to the forefront of literature, inspiring writers like Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, and Caryl Phillips to reconnect with their own roots.
The exhibition features a wide-ranging selection of artists whose works echo Rhys’s life and texts: from Louise Bourgeois to Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman to Francis Picabia. Through painting, photography, sculpture, and texts, these artists evoke the internal and external worlds Rhys constructed. Here, body politics, colonial legacies, exile, identity, and states of womanhood converge with the author’s voice.
Hilton Als, as he did in previous exhibitions on Joan Didion and James Baldwin, places literary figures at the heart of a polyphonic artistic chorus. Postures offers a powerful space to reimagine Jean Rhys’s exiled world through modern art.
🔗 Apartment No:26 Note: Rhys was not at the margins of literature but at its very center, giving voice to the unnoticed. This exhibition similarly brings the margins to the forefront.
📍 Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World
Michael Werner Gallery, Mayfair, London
📅 September 12 – November 22, 2025
