The Time is Always Now review – striking shades of brilliant black figurative art

National Portrait Gallery, London
From an escaped slave pointing a gun to a kid in a Birmingham barber shop, this terrific show shuttles back and forth between times, places, sculpture and painting

Hands on hips, feet apart, head up and tilted to one side, her eyes closed in concentration, Thomas J Price’s monumental, gold-patinated bronze black woman towers over us. Oblivious to our presence and our gaze, she’s spotlit against a dark wall. Stilled in a perpetual moment, it is as if she’s listening to music only she can hear. Based on 3D scans of people Price has encountered in London and Los Angeles, As Sounds Turn to Noise is a portrait of someone who doesn’t exist, but she’s present in every sense, owning the space around her.

Also with a hand on her hip, Claudette Johnson’s self-portrait rears before a backdrop derived from Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Johnson gives the viewer a baleful, almost accusatory look. If she’s playing a game with Picasso’s infatuation with what he saw as the exotic and the primitive, she does so by being more real and more present than his mask-like heads. She isn’t playing nature to anyone’s culture.