![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/5c99108583bbc8f296bfe9cf251625257213c44e-1273x864.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nIn Kerry James Marshall\u2019s The Academy (2012), which will open the American artist\u2019s retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, a male life model strikes a Black Power pose, his clenched fist raised in the air. The work, says Mark Godfrey, the exhibition\u2019s co-curator, attests \u201cto Marshall\u2019s interest and involvement in the academy as an educational institution\u201d. The RA is, after all, home to not only a renowned art school but also one of the oldest life modelling studios in the world. The work is just one of many paintings that combine pivotal moments in history with elements of art historical significance in Marshall\u2019s own inimitable way.<\/p>\n
The Histories, an exhibition conceived by Godfrey in collaboration with Marshall and Adrian Locke, the RA\u2019s chief curator, is Marshall\u2019s largest show to date in Europe and is timed to celebrate his 70th birthday. After London, it will travel to Kunsthaus Zu\u0308rich and the Muse\u0301e d\u2019Art Moderne in Paris.<\/p>\n
The exhibition\u2019s title speaks to the layered histories in Marshall\u2019s work, to the history of painting as well as African and transatlantic history. Early paintings such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) and Invisible Man (1986) can be read as referring to a historically constructed \u201cracial\u201d identity, as well as, through Marshall\u2019s painterly handling of Blackness, the point at which the figurative is brought to the edge of abstraction.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Marshall\u2019s School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) Photo: Sean Pathasema; \u00a9 the artist, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery<\/p>\n
Other highlights in the show will include De Style (1993), with its title borrowed from a neighbourhood barbershop in Los Angeles, where Marshall was partly raised, and a play on De Stijl, hence the prominent use of the Dutch art movement\u2019s signature primary colours.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the works of the 2010s are cryptic and painterly, full of extravagant citations and references. For Godfrey, the relevance of Marshall\u2019s painting today lies in its \u201cmany layers and complexities\u201d as well as the meticulously created and intentional compositions. The enormous School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) is a richly decorated beauty salon, walls adorned with posters that advertise Black beauty and a Chris Ofili<\/a> exhibition at Tate Britain. The anamorphic projection of a blonde woman\u2019s head riffs on Hans Holbein\u2019s The Ambassadors<\/a>, while the flash of light in the mirror echoes Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s Las Meninas<\/a>.<\/p>\n The exhibition will be in the RA\u2019s main galleries, building on a strand of programming over the past few years that has given the autumn slot over to a major contemporary artist\u2014Royal Academicians like Michael Craig-Martin<\/a> or, in Marshall\u2019s case, honorary Academicians\u2014with the ambition, as Locke puts it, to shine a light on long careers but also to celebrate recent work.<\/p>\n Marshall will be including eight new paintings in the show, each exploring underacknowledged episodes of African history and the transatlantic slave trade. The artist\u2019s entire project can be seen as a wake-up call for painting, reminding us of its potential to open onto a space in which the relation between past and present becomes the subject for a fresh set of narrative possibilities.<\/p>\n