November 2026
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Expressionist painter Herbert Gentry (1919–2003) grew up in Harlem and found his visual language in postwar Paris, in connection with the CoBrA artist group. His painting is marked by spontaneity, with the subconscious as its source. Fifty years after the 1976 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, his art returns to its walls. The circle closes.
Photo: Herbert Gentry paints in his studio in Copenhagen. 1963 © Pressehuset. Photo: Gunvor Betting
The exhibition is presented by Eva Livijn Art Space, formerly Galleri Futura, which has represented Gentry since the 1980s. Ulrika Flink is the exhibition's curator. It opens in the presence of the artist Mary Anne Rose, Gentry's widow and custodian of his artistic legacy.
Herbert Gentry's retrospective at the Academy in 1976, fifty years later.
Fifty years after his retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Herbert Gentry's art returns to Fredsgatan. The exhibition brings together works from both sides of the Atlantic, several of which were shown at the academy as early as 1976.
Herbert Gentry (1919–2003) was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. He first saw Paris as an American soldier in 1944 and returned in 1946, among the first to study there after the war. In Montparnasse he opened the club Chez Honey, where jazz and art met. There he found his visual language, spontaneous painting with the subconscious as its source, close to the CoBrA artists Asger Jorn, Corneille and Karel Appel.
Gentry's painting moves freely between abstraction and figuration. The faces and masks emerge from rhythmic fields of color, with roots in African art and jazz. "It's not just me painting," he explained. "It's the people who lived before me, united with me."
From the late 1950s he lived in Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Stockholm, from 1980 in Malmö, but Paris was where he returned every year, with the Chelsea Hotel in New York as a fixed point from 1971.
He died in Stockholm in 2003. His work is held in collections including Moderna Museet, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where it is currently on view.
