Donald Locke

This work is titled after the Guyana sugar plantation Dageraad. In 1763 it was the site of Guyana’s first rebellion of enslaved people. Locke addressed the themes of plantations in works from 1972–9 and he considered them some of his most important. They function as visual metaphors for the corrosive plantation system of labour that shaped the history of the artist’s native Guyana under Dutch and later British colonial rule. The abstract minimalism of this painting reflects the brutal uniformity of colonial rule and slavery, which reduced people and land to expendable commodities.