The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the first exhibition in France devoted to American artist Kerry James Marshall, born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. Organized at the initiative of the Royal Academy of Arts, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, it brings together 70 works, including 8 previously unseen paintings created for the exhibition.
Regarded as one of the most influential contemporary painters, Kerry James Marshall creates monumental compositions in which the everyday lives of Black people take on an epic dimension. By placing these figures within archetypes of art history from which they were excluded, he questions their absence and asserts their place in history. His work evokes the forced crossing of enslaved Africans to the Americas and the legacy of American Black mobilizations, from the civil rights movement to Black Power, without resorting to direct depictions of violence. Nourished by history, nineteenth-century French painting, contemporary culture, Afrofuturism and science fiction, his work unfolds across painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture.
Conceived with the artist, the exhibition traces more than four decades of creation through cycles of works drawn from public and private collections in Europe and North America. The chronothematic route is divided into twelve ensembles produced between 1980 and today.
* Painting Narratives