Artist to Watch: Khalif Tahir Thompson Invites Y2K Nostalgia with Paintings Inspired by Childhood
The Brooklyn-raised creative has ten new works on display in his first solo exhibition with Victoria Miro
For Khalif Tahir Thompson, levity in life’s darkest moments served as inspiration for his latest show, “Send in the Clowns,” the title an ode to the 1973 Stephen Sondheim song. “It’s a theatrical metaphor for ‘let’s start the jokes’ and a way to mask pain with humor,” says Thompson, who is mounting his first solo exhibition with Victoria Miro since joining the gallery last spring. “It’s my response to difficulties and hardship growing up. It reflects what I did to lighten the mood.”
The youngest of four, he looks back on his formative years in a public housing development in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn and the death of his father when the artist was 12. “I was dealing with loss and life and figuring out who I was as a Black queer man,” says Thompson, who is known for placing his subjects in collaged domestic scenes, using everything from oil pastels to leather and Post-it notes. But these recent vignettes do not only respond to tragedy, he explains. “They are a celebration of my journey and my motivations as an artist.”
The ten new paintings, on display at the London gallery from October 8 to November 7, depict various scenes from Thompson’s childhood in the aughts. Y2K’s nostalgic sensibility hits home with the Yale MFA, who mines inspiration from his late grandmother’s photo albums, adolescent memories, and visits to his old neighborhood, which is an hour from his studio in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, as source material. “I was looking at these images from when I was seven. I thought my older sister was so beautiful,” he says, pointing to a portrait still in progress of a statuesque woman in an ethereal white dress with a bare bedroom bureau behind her. “She had the highlights in her hair and really thin eyebrows and always had something sparkly on.”
Tapping into legacies from Barkley L. Hendricks to James Whistler, Thompson likens his practice to the flow of jazz compositions, often putting one color down, sitting, and staring at it for hours, then working “really fast” once intuition takes hold. “I go with the feel or vibe of a painting first,” he clarifies. “I try not to have too many preliminary sketches. I like to just hit it and build a moment rather than plan a moment and execute.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Narrative Hook” Subscribe to the magazine.