Keith Piper: Red Flags

Niru Ratnam is pleased to present a major exhibition by Keith Piper titled Red Flags. Spanning more than four decades of practice, the exhibition brings early works from the 1980s, unseen since then, into dialogue with more recent and newly produced works. It examines recurring concerns within Piper’s work such as the relationship between race, power and representation, but it also articulates an erosion of belief in the ability of progressive politics to avert the return of political right-wing extremism and ecological disaster. 

Piper emerged in the early 1980s as a founding member of the BLK Art Group, a  collective of radical young Black British artists who confronted racism, colonial legacies and exclusion. Through self-organised exhibitions, articles, debates and conferences, the group widened into what is now termed the Black Art movement in Britain which included artists such as Donald Rodney, Lubaina Himid, Eddie Chambers, Sonia Boyce and Piper himself. 

Several key works from Piper’s formative period anchor the exhibition. Visitors first encounter two works made in 1982 and last exhibited in the BLK Art Group exhibitions.  Piper created The Weak Against the Weak in response to the aftermath of Samuel Doe’s coup in Liberia. Set against the backdrop of the Liberian flag, itself modelled on the Stars and Stripes, the work combines references to Cold War geopolitics, American neo-colonialism and the political contradictions of postcolonial nationhood. Displayed opposite, We Proud Builders of Black Nations  engages with contemporary debates  of the early 1980s surrounding Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism and collective self-determination.  Positioned at the entrance to the exhibition, these works introduce a question that runs throughout Red Flags: how do symbols, movements and political ideals shift over time, from vehicles of collective hope to markers of conflict, warning and unresolved historical struggle?

A more recent work based on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa suggests how these concerns have evolved in response to the present. A solitary figure stands upon a fragmented vessel raising a red flag whose meaning remains deliberately unstable: a symbol of solidarity, a warning signal or a gesture of distress. Referencing historical collapse, contemporary ecological warnings as well as claims about the "end of history", the work reflects upon the erosion of political certainties and collective futures. 

The exhibition’s hinge between the two floors and between historical and contemporary works is the video work The Perfect City (2007), which examines the persistent desire to construct ideal social orders through systems of planning, classification and control. Moving between architectural speculation, urban development and social engineering, the work extends concerns present in earlier works: the relationship between utopian aspiration and political authority, and the ways apparently rational systems frequently generate exclusion and hierarchy. 

These concerns culminate in Piper’s first version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1984), the first time the work has been exhibited in over 40 years. This and the subsequent slightly later painting with the same title are landmark works of the Black Art movement. Reimagining the biblical horsemen through the figures of a Conservative voter, a police officer, an American military general and Ronald Reagan, the work transforms apocalyptic prophecy into a diagnosis of contemporary political conditions. Executed across four monumental stitched bedsheets combining image, text and graffiti-like mark making, it demonstrates Piper’s ability to fuse political critique with a deliberately hybrid visual language drawing equally upon popular culture, protest imagery and religious symbolism.

Across four decades Piper has developed one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary British art, encompassing painting, installation, video and digital media. Recent exhibitions have included Viva Voce at Tate Britain (2024–), Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy of Arts (2024), Life Between Islands at Tate Britain (2021) and the 25th Biennale of Sydney (2026). His work is held in numerous public collections including Tate, MIMA, the Arts Council Collection, Manchester Art Gallery and Sheffield Museums.