It takes balls to call your show ‘history of painting’, but Kerry James Marshall has some serious cojones. It’s not what it first appears, though. This isn’t really an entire history of painting, from the caves to the galleries. That would be stupid. Instead, this is a micro-narrative about the place of black bodies and black artists in art history.
There are three rough groups of works here: densely dark images of black figures, ultra-simple bright abstracts, and supermarket catalogue-esque paintings of auction results. The cheeky, pop-inflected auction works contrast the prices paid for black and white artists; 10k for a Faith Ringold, over a mil for a Warhol, that sort of thing. Value of art is shackled directly to race.
The abstracts – flat blank white canvases crisscrossed with simple primary colour splashes – play with art as a reducible, graspable concept of pure pictorial simplicity. And then the figurative works come in and knock you out. Black figures appear against bright backgrounds, their features shadowed and eclipsed by the light. They walk and pose in urban spaces, are caught getting changed. In one stunning painting, groups of black school children sit on the floor of a stuffy art museum listening to their black teacher. It’s a dark, stormy, aggressive painting that feels shocking just by making you realise how white museums and galleries are.
Kerry James Marshall is dealing with a heavy load of art luggage here. He makes the viewer question how we’re told about art, forces us to ask who is telling us, who decides, who is swept aside, who defines the narratives, and why, to what end? He uses his skill and aesthetic brilliance to infiltrate, undermine and question every one of those ideas. If he was a weak painter, it would only work conceptually, but he’s not, so it works visually too. If history is written by the victors, then Kerry James Marshall's history of painting is the beginning of some kind of resistance.
