Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Things

Organized by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with the M HKA (Amberes), Kunsthal Charlotternborg (Copenhagen) and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona), the exhibition entitled Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Things includes a selection of works centered on the diverse themes and motivations that the artist approached throughout a career that reveals his aesthetic and political commitment.

The exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía concentrates on pictorial work created before 2000, while the exhibition at the Fundació Tàpies, presented at the same time, shows more recent works approached through several formats.

This is one of the largest and most comprehensive exhibitions dedicated to a North American artist. Marshall's artistic trajectory is articulated through the creative treatment of themes associated with life, culture and Afro-American culture and history approached from multiple perspectives that offer new visions and elements associated with racial politics, cultural representation and social emancipation.

In his work Marshall maintains a constant reflection on "negritude" (blackness), as he reclaims that which he calls "the black," a polysemic idea charged with visual, cultural and aesthetic implications. He is committed to compensate the absence of a black culture in the museum spaces, something that Marshall believes that is marginally represented as it pertains to themes and authors. In this manner, he establishes a counter-archive that replaces the dominant visual culture, which provokes questions associated with legitimization, power and marginalization within the history of art.

In order to perform such compensation in favor of a black imaginary, Marshall relies on a large variety of visual mediums, specially painting. All these mediums are used in an experimental and self-reflective manner as tools to fulfill his ethical commitment to the racial struggle, given that, as the author himself points "You cannot be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you've got some kind of social responsibility."