The career-spanning show surveys four decades
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In works both largescale and luminous, the American artist Kerry James Marshall employs the grand style of history painting to center Black life, leisure and beauty. His figures, rendered in uncompromising shades of black, occupy spaces long denied to them — pastoral landscapes or domestic interiors — that the artist transforms with his figures as protagonists. Works from across Marshall’s celebrated career go on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, where Marshall is an Honorary Royal Academician, for the artists’s largest exhibition in Europe to date.
More than 70 artworks — primarily paintings but also prints, drawings and sculpture — made between 1980 and today will address themes including Civil Rights and Black power movements, the Middle Passage and contemporary Black life. Two of the largest galleries will display the large-format paintings inspired by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte and Georges Seurat for which the artist is famous, including “School of Beauty, School of Culture,” 2012, and the vast “Knowledge and Wonder,” 1995, his largest painting to date. In a new, never-before-seen series of eight paintings that closes the show, Marshall explores episodes in African history and the transatlantic slave trade, particularly the active role African slave traders played in enslavement.
Kerry James Marshall, “De Style,” 1993. © Kerry James Marshall. Photograph: © Museum Associates/LACMA
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