The Kerry James Marshall retrospective “The Histories” received rave reviews when it was on show at the Royal Academy in London last year so I had been keen to see it now that it has landed in Zürich. It is indeed an excellent exhibition and I might go and see it again when it travels to Paris this autumn.
Kerry James Marshall (1955) is regarded as one of the most important painters working today. His large-scale, multi-layered works consistently place Black figures at their centre. Since the early 1980s, he has critically engaged with the Western tradition of history painting, exposing its omissions and mechanisms of exclusion.
In his work Marshall often merges references to the Western art historical canon, from Manet's picnickers to Hockney's shimmering pools, with motifs drawn from popular culture, political history and everyday African American life, creating complex paintings of great narrative density. "De Style” (1993), a vibrant group portrait and Marshall’s first museum sale, is at once a reference to the Dutch art movement "De Stijl" and to the cultural significance of barbershops in Black communal life. The monumental “School of Beauty. School of Culture” (2012) features a reference to Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” in the form of an anamorphic distortion of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which can be read as a symbol of the suppression of Black beauty ideals by the American mainstream. I love the two toddlers who are puzzled by the floating structure.
Each of Marshall’s canvases stars Black figures who are poised, forceful, and, more often than not, simply enjoying themselves. Yet beneath the pleasure lurk darker themes: from the Middle Passage and slave rebellions to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, which formed a backdrop to Marshall's childhood.
"Africa Revisited" is a series of new paintings that challenge popular narratives of African history, from the complicity of Black traders in the slave trade to the murder of Shaka Zulu by his half-brothers. These brightly colored, sharply outlined canvases place Marshall fully into the genre he has long coveted, history painting. Art, he insists, cannot alter politics; it can only direct our attention. This exhibition does exactly that, and does it on a scale that few living painters could sustain.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is at the Kunsthaus Zürich until 16 August 2026. It will be on show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris from 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027.