"Biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious, Kerry James Marshall's The Histories is the largest show of the black American's work ever held in Europe. Its effects are cumulative. The Histories charts the 69-year-old painter's intellectual as well as practical development, his themes, his switches of media and of focus and attention. Everything is here for a reason."
"He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage, from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall. He paints scenes of kidnappings and of enslavement in Africa and of a black cop sitting on the hood of his squad car I love the jagged stylised flare of the streetlights in the background. Marshall knows that everything is contended and complex and that there are no innocent images."
The Histories presents a sweeping survey of work that traces artistic development, thematic preoccupations, and shifts in media across decades. Scenes range from everyday settings—bars, beauty parlours, parks and dancehalls—to wrenching histories like kidnappings, enslavement and the Middle Passage. Marshall combines dense visual detail, stylised forms and dark humour to expose complexity and contested meanings in images, using motifs such as streetlights, painted textures and ironic tableau. A Middle Passage series juxtaposes leisure and drowning maps of Africa, while early works like the 1980 egg tempera A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self signal literary and formal influences.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]