Donald Rodney review – the young dying artist who struck

Spike Island, Bristol
As sickle cell anaemia attacked his body, the artist made political drawings on X-rays and used his own skin for sculpture

Donald Rodney died as an artist in the ascendant. With Keith Piper, a fellow student at Trent Polytechnic in 1981, Rodney was foundational in the politically acute BLK Art Group, committed to pressing social issues within an art world hung up on form and theory. After the success of his 1989 solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, in 1997 he had an exhibition across town at the South London Gallery (in the year Tracey Emin’s show there was considered career-making). He died the following year, aged 36.

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker, at Bristol’s Spike Island, is a scholarly survey of the few works that survived a brief career punctuated by multiple hospitalisations and invasive surgery. In a vitrine are 10 of the sketchbooks that acted as a portal back to the creative space of the studio when Rodney was bedridden. Through them he developed a compelling personal iconography. By necessity, most work in this show is the result of long reflection and refinement on Rodney’s part before he had the physical liberty to go about the actual making.