Kerry James Marshall
Mastry New and Sealed Exhibition Hardcover Catalogue

Name: Mastry New and Sealed Exhibition Hardcover Catalogue
Brand: Kerry James Marshall
Price: 500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America's greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist's career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism. hroughout a career spanning four decades, Kerry James Marshall has continuously interrogated and addressed the omission of black individuals from the Western art-historical canon. Across painting and a variety of different media, his complex and multilayered portrayals synthesize disparate genres, while seeking to counter stereotypical representations. As Lanka Tattersall notes, "Marshall's determination to mark the historical absence of black bodies in the Western canon of painting and his emphatic, programmatic insertion of blackness into the field of art are carried through the literal matter—the pigments—of his paintings."1 Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. He studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning his B.F.A. in 1978 and an honorary doctorate in 1999. In 2014, Marshall joined David Zwirner. Kerry James Marshall: Look See, an exhibition of new paintings by the artist, marked his first gallery solo show at David Zwirner in London that same year. Marshall has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States since the late 1970s and early 1980s. This year, Kerry James Marshall: Collected Works was presented at the Rennie Museum in Vancouver and Kerry James Marshall: Works on Paper at The Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2017, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, the first major museum survey of the artist’s work, specially focusing on his paintings from the past thirty-five years. The show was first shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016, followed by the Met Breuer in New York. In 2015, he created a large-scale mural specifically for the High Line, marking the artist’s first public commission in New York. In 2013, his work was the subject of a major survey entitled Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff. The exhibition was first on view at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in Antwerp. In 2014, it traveled to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, and was co-hosted by two venues in Spain, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Foreword by Thomas P. Campbell, Madeleine Grynsztejn, and Philippe Vergne. Text by Ian Alteveer, Kerry James Marshall, Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete, and Lanka Tattersall. The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism. This title is out of print Publisher: Skira/ Rizzoli, 2016 1st edition 4th printing Hardcover, illustrated throughout, 320 pages Dimensions: 9.4 x 1.1 x 12 inches

Creator:

Kerry James Marshall (1955, American)

Dimensions:

Height: 1 in (2.54 cm)Width: 12 in (30.48 cm)Depth: 9 in (22.86 cm)

Medium:

Archival Paper

Period:

2010-

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Draper, UT

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU132729408822

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Kerry James Marshall

In his multifaceted work, Kerry James Marshall strives to address “the lack in the image bank” by elevating Black figures who have been excluded from Western art. Using a variety of black pigments, the artist heightens the skin tones of his subjects to honor their identities rather than ignore them. Best known for his large-scale paintings, Marshall also works in collage, photography, video and other media.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Marshall later grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where his family relocated in 1963. As he studied art, including at the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles, he was struck by the absence of Black bodies in art history and museums. At the age of 25, he painted A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980). Its central figure, whose features almost merge with the background in their varying shades of black, references Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist of which cannot be seen as a human being by other members of society because he is Black. For Marshall, A Portrait marked the start of an ongoing examination of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of Black Americans.

Marshall’s practice has continued to concentrate on confronting stereotypes in the Black experience by celebrating joy and commemorating moments of Black history. His paintings frequently engage with the white-dominated traditions of the art historical canon by borrowing elements of style ranging from the Renaissance to the abstract movements of the 20th century. While he has said that he is driven by a sense of social responsibility for what he witnessed growing up in the South before the Civil Rights Act and in Los Angeles during the Watts riots of 1965, Marshall doesn’t focus on trauma in his works’ narrative scenes. Instead, they regularly depict people involved in everyday activities yet portrayed with the monumentality of a tableau painting.

Now based in Chicago, Marshall is recognized as one of the country’s leading contemporary painters, with a 2016 retrospective, "Mastry," touring the MCA Chicago, MOCA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2018, his painting Marshall’s Past Times (1997) sold for $21.1 million, the highest ever auction price for a work by a living Black artist.

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