Encounter with Kerry James Marshall

13 June, 2014 - 7:00 p.m.
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
In collaboration with
Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994. Denver Art Museum Collection: Funds from Polly and Mark Addison, the Alliance for Contemporary Art, Caroline Morgan, and Colorado Contemporary Collectors: Suzanne Farver, Linda and Ken Heller, Jan and Frederick Mayer, Beverly and Bernard Rosen, Annalee and Wagner Schorr, and anonymous donors, 1995.77 © Kerry James Marshall Photograph courtesy of the Denver Art Museum
Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994. Denver Art Museum Collection: Funds from Polly and Mark Addison, the Alliance for Contemporary Art, Caroline Morgan, and Colorado Contemporary Collectors: Suzanne Farver, Linda and Ken Heller, Jan and Frederick Mayer, Beverly and Bernard Rosen, Annalee and Wagner Schorr, and anonymous donors, 1995.77 © Kerry James Marshall Photograph courtesy of the Denver Art Museum

The work of Kerry James Marshall (Birmingham, Alabama, 1955), one of the most preeminent American artists of his generation, approaches, with intense complexity and heterogeneous languages and mediums – figurative and abstract painting, as well as photography, installation, video, sculpture and comics – themes that revolve around history, the social situation and the public image of Afro-American culture.

Marshall calls into question the canon of the history of Western art and the mechanisms of legitimation that operate within it. Through experimentation with the conventions of representation, his work is presented as an intellectual exercise of analysis concerned with aspects of subordinate identity and the space of the black subject, both in the current social context and in official history. Thus, images of themes such as Pan-Africanism, colonialism and the Civil Rights Movement are constructed or recontextualised by drawing attention to the void that exists in the canonical history and conditions of reception.
 
In this encounter Kerry James Marshall introduces his own work, along with the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (13 June  – 26 October, 2014), one of the most expansive selection of works devoted to an artist with very few exhibitions in Europe to date.