Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting

Kerry James Marshall is one of America's greatest living painters. History of Painting presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself.

In History of Painting, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In the paintings in this book, Marshall's critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life.

Essays by Teju Cole and Hal Foster help readers navigate the artist's masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as Untitled(Underpainting) (2018) and Marshall's own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall's eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London, in 2018.

Through its formal acuity, Kerry James Marshall’s (b. 1955) work reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. As the artist has written, ’I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what Art is returned as a critical issue.’ Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational painting, Marshall has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and styles, even pulling talismans from the canvases of his forbearers and recontextualizing them within a modern setting. At the center of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings and sculpture, is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility so long ascribed to black bodies in the Western pictorial tradition, and the creation of what he calls a ’counter-archive’ that reinscribes these figures within its narrative arc.