Kerry James Marshall at David Zwirner

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The paintings everyone's talking about because it's easier to talk about prices than art. That's the hegemony of price. It is the abstraction allowing exchange, both monetary and conversational. Everyone can talk about it, even if poorly.


see too: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

AR: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Originally Posted: July 3rd, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Marshall absorbs narrative painting's more modern languages, e.g.: illustration, comics, advertising. Using commercial clarity to sharpen images to iconic while not relinquishing the subtly, slipperiness or open-endedness that the commercial trades for bluntness. Midnight black of KJM's figures slides between transparent ghosts, starkly visible, and shared tone blurring its figures, aptly analogizing the (America's) paradoxical black body: Invisible Man, vivid targets, everyone fitting the description, everywhere and invisible. It would be stupid to call it not painterly, but it lacks the masturbatory juice that the painterly usually entails, far too fastidious, serious even, for that, trading the painterly for the power of an image well constructed, Marshall's wild inventiveness in making paintings that want to be so clearly seen.