Kerry James MarshallAmong the quandaries of contemporary art is its discomfort with the great traditions of painting: narrative content, personal expression, beauty. Art today is often deeply ironic, viewing these principles as dysfunctional and problematic. In Kerry James Marshall we have an artist who is a master of modern and postmodern art idioms and yet profoundly concerned with classical art traditions. His work is provocative, politically confrontational, and alive with wit and charm. At the same time, it is richly personal and extraordinarily beautiful. His large scenes are built up in opulent, textured passages of paint, collage, pencil, glitter, and ink on unstretched canvas or paper. His exquisite colors, subtle brush-work, and consummate draftsmanship seduce the eye; his use of large scale calls to mind the grand tableaus of past centuries; his subjects are readily identifiable by any resident of an American city. Marshall creates lyrical images of the African-American urban experience at the turn of the millennium. His scenes of family life in the public-housing projects and solid middle-class homes of black urbanites are layered narratives of social order and disorder, of family relationships and friendships, of memories and myths. Drawing upon a vast body of visual material from high and pop culture -- films, pulp novels, fairy tales, newspaper photographs, and the full panoply of art history -- he creates vivid, dreamlike scenes as strange as they are familiar. |
