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| Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Club Couple), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel, 59 5/8 x 59 5/8 inches (151.5 x 151.5 cm). Image via davidzwirner.com. |
Kerry
James Marshall: Look See
October 10 – November 22, 2014
Kerry James Marshall in
conversation with Angela Choon, Senior Partner at David Zwirner, Saturday, October 11, 2014, 11am
Free and open to the public, but reservations
are required
RSVP to charlotte@davidzwirner.com
24 Grafton
Street
London, UK
From David
Zwirner press release:
David
Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Kerry James
Marshall. On view at the London gallery, this is the artist’s first solo show
in the city since his 2005 presentation at the Camden Arts Centre. It is
concurrent with the travelling exhibition Kerry
James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, currently on view at the Fundació
Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in
Madrid (both through 26 October 2014).
With a
career spanning almost three decades, Marshall is well known for his paintings
depicting actual and imagined events from African-American history. His complex
and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate
gardens, land- and seascapes synthesize different traditions and genres, while
seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society.
Engaging with issues of identity and individualism, he frequently depicts his
figures in an extreme opaque, black colour, which stylizes their appearance
while being a literal and rhetorical reference to the term black and its diametric
opposition to the white “mainstream.” With art history today acknowledged as
having been written from the perspective of white Western artists, Marshall
assimilates the limitations and contradictions inherent in its styles,
subjects, and chronologies, creating highly personalised works that appear
recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time.
Marshall
also produces drawings in the style of comic strips, as well as sculptural
installations, photography, and video. Like his paintings, these works accumulate
various stylistic influences to address the historiography of black art, while
at the same time drawing attention to the fact that they are not inherently
partisan because their subjects are black.
For his
first show with David Zwirner, Marshall will present new paintings that
collectively examine notions of observing, witnessing, and exhibiting. While
central to the relationship between viewer and artwork, these overarching
concepts are typically steeped in conventions that render them passive acts.
Yet, Marshall’s works subtly defy genre expectations and invite idiosyncratic,
often ambiguous interpretations. Entitled Look
See, the exhibition takes its point of departure in the etymological
difference between looking and seeing, which embodies varying degrees of
attentiveness. While “looking” is generally understood to be a removed,
detached action, “seeing” involves perception and making connections between
elements.
Works on
view depict a series of characters amid ornate backdrops and dressed in outfits
designed specifically for the paintings over a period of several years. Many
emphasize the idea of display, such as Untitled
(Crowning Moment), Marshall’s portrait of a young woman wearing an
elaborate headband—based on a news photograph of a contestant putting on the
winning crown at a beauty pageant—and Untitled
(Beach Towel) in which the reclining female in a garden setting looks past
the viewer to a camera not visible in the composition. In Untitled (Club Couple), a smiling couple poses blatantly as the
male figure implicates the viewer in his plans by showing a small box with an
engagement ring behind his girlfriend’s back. The exhibitionism inherent in
such paintings—putting oneself on view—echoes the notion of pure presentation
that runs throughout the artist’s new works. Marshall’s characters offer
themselves to be looked at or are actively engaged with looking at something,
including themselves.
Untitled (Mirror Girl), correspondingly, can
only be seen in a mirror, where she appears to pose for her own enjoyment. In Untitled (Pink Towel), no indication is
given to the identity of the woman, nude except for a towel that she holds up
to casually cover her body. Looking straight at the viewer, her tilted head and
pearl earring can be seen to imbue the everyday scene with an art-historical
reference to Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s well-known portrait Girl with
a Pearl Earring (c. 1665).
In the
large-scale Untitled (Studio),
Marshall depicts the process of a model having her portrait painted. The messy
paints smattered across the table, floor, and even the resting dog further
offer a metaphor for the staged nature of each of the works. The sense of
fabrication is underscored by the unconventional clothing worn by most of the
characters, created for the series as for a play or a movie. Yet while their
peculiar combination of realism and fiction can be seen to connect the works
conceptually—and also defines an immediacy rarely found in contemporary
painting—each retains a singularity that seems to suggest that nothing has come
before it. In Untitled (Blot), a
single abstract canvas, also on a large scale, underscores the delicate link
between representation and the real world more generally. As with Marshall’s
wider oeuvre, fabrication here becomes linked to the realisation that the
history of art as we know it is itself a construction of particular cultural
and political perspectives, and always open to reinvention.
A fully
illustrated publication is forthcoming by David Zwirner Books featuring essays
by art critic Robert Storr and curator Hamza Walker.
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