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The Histories

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This spring/summer, experience the monumental paintings of US artist Kerry James Marshall. His powerful works explore the lives and histories of Black Americans through images filled with colour, pain, hope and vitality.

Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Ruth and Jacob Bloom. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

“I try to make the black paints that I use as complex as any other colour on the palette.”

— Kerry James Marshall

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African American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama; lives in Chicago) is regarded as one of the most important painters working today. His large-scale, multi-layered works consistently place Black figures at their centre. Since the early 1980s, his painting has critically engaged with the Western tradition of history painting, exposing its omissions and mechanisms of exclusion. Art-historical references merge with motifs drawn from popular culture, political history, everyday African American life and personal memory, forming complex pictorial spaces of great narrative density. Marked by intense colour, technical virtuosity and precise composition, the paintings address questions of representation, power, belonging and historical accountability, while also affirming joy, presence and hope. At the Kunsthaus Zürich, the exhibition presents the first large-scale survey of the artist’s work in the German-speaking world, bringing together key works from different phases of his career as well as new paintings.

The exhibition is a cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, curated under the direction of Mark Godfrey in collaboration with the participating institutions, including Cathérine Hug for the Kunsthaus Zürich. Supported by David Zwirner .

Gallery

KJM_Painter
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2008, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. Richard Norton Memorial Fund and purchase through the generosity of Nancy B. Tieken © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London. Photo: Anne Arca
KJM_The-club
Kerry James Marshall, The Club, 2011–12, Hudgins Family © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London. Photo: Jack Hems
Kerry-James-Marshall-School-of-Beauty
Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012, Collection of the Birmingham Musseum of Art, AL © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Sean Pathasema
KJM_Policeman
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (policeman), 2015, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mimi Haas in honour of Marie-Josée Kravis, 2016 © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © 2026. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence
KJM_Plunge
Kerry James Marshall, Plunge, 1992, Collection of Eleanor Heyman Propp © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London. Photo: Anna Arca
Key-5.NEW
Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Promised Gift of Steven and Deborah Lebowitz. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA
KJM_Keeping-the-culture
Kerry James Marshall, Keeping the Culture, 2010, Robert Taylor and Edith Cooper © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Private Collection Christie‘s, Images/Bridgeman Images
KJM_Gulf-Stream
Kerry James Marshall, Gulf Stream, 2003, Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004 © Kerry James Marshall, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London.
KJM_Vignette_13
Kerry James Marshall, Vignette #13, 2008, Susan Manilow Collection © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
KJM_Haul
Kerry James Marshall, Haul, 2025 © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

Program

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Eröffnung «Kerry James Marshall. The Histories»

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Kerry James Marshall. The Histories

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Ill: Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Beauty Queen), 2014, Private collection, © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London