This autumn, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is giving Kerry James Marshall the kind of space his paintings demand. From 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories brings together around seventy works spanning more than four decades, from early paintings of the 1980s to eight new works created for the exhibition. Organised with the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Kunsthaus Zürich, it is the first major exhibition in France devoted to the American artist, and an overdue opportunity to encounter one of the most important painters working today.
Kerry James Marshall, Invisible Man, 1986, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky Collection © Kerry James Marshall, Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London. Photo: Jack Hems
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, and raised in Los Angeles, Marshall grew up at a moment when the Civil Rights Movement was reshaping America. He later studied at the Otis Art Institute, where the great African American artist Charles White became an important influence, before eventually settling in Chicago. What makes Marshall so fascinating, however, is the way he combines this personal and political history with an extraordinary knowledge of art history. His paintings converse with Manet, Velázquez, Holbein, Seurat and the grand European tradition, but also with African art, comics, popular culture and science fiction. He doesn’t reject the Western canon so much as enter it, take possession of it and expand who gets to appear within it.
At the heart of Marshall’s work are his unmistakably deep-black figures. They fall in love, pose for portraits, spend time in parks, visit beauty salons and barbershops, and occupy vast canvases with a monumentality historically reserved for kings, saints and mythological heroes. The wonderful School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), pictured in the Paris exhibition announcement, transforms an everyday beauty salon into something approaching a history painting. Look closely and Marshall’s pictures become even richer: art-historical references, jokes, political symbols and fragments of popular culture are tucked into their surfaces. Even his use of black is remarkably nuanced, created through different black pigments rather than as a single flat tone.
Kerry James Marshall, Slow Dance, 1992–93, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; acquired through the Smart Family Foundation Fund for Contemporary Art and funds provided by the Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisition
I was lucky enough to see The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2025, where it was Marshall’s largest European exhibition to date, and the scale of the show made a real impression on me. Seeing these huge paintings together makes clear that Marshall isn’t simply inserting Black figures into familiar art-historical formats; he is asking us to reconsider how those formats were constructed in the first place. The exhibition moves between the Civil Rights era, Black Power, the Middle Passage, domestic life, beauty and leisure, while Marshall’s visual references constantly pull you backwards and forwards through centuries of painting. There is a lot to absorb, but the pictures remain wonderfully immediate.
The Paris presentation should be particularly interesting for the exhibition’s final chapters. Among the newest works are paintings exploring lesser-known and sometimes uncomfortable episodes of African history and the transatlantic slave trade, including the role played by Africans in selling other Africans to European slave traders. Marshall deliberately complicates a history that is too often presented in simplified terms. Elsewhere, works such as the evolving sculpture Wake connect the history of slavery with its descendants and its continuing presence in American memory. This willingness to embrace complexity is one reason Marshall’s work feels so powerful: history is never simply an illustration or backdrop, but something continually being questioned, reconstructed and painted anew.
Kerry James Marshall, The Academy 2012, Dr. Daniel S. Berger Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
What I particularly like about Marshall is that, despite the seriousness of these subjects, the work never feels like a history lesson disguised as contemporary art. His paintings are beautiful, strange, theatrical, sometimes funny and incredibly rewarding to look at. You can approach them through politics and identity, but equally through colour, composition, perspective and Marshall’s obvious love of painting itself. After seeing the London exhibition in 2025, I’m very curious to experience The Histories again in Paris. A year later, and in a different museum and city, I suspect these paintings will open up an entirely new conversation.
More information HERE.
