Since the 1993 Whitney Biennial when Kerry James Marshall showed large paintings on unstretched tarps of American families in the projects, I've adored his work. I didn't fully understand the reasons why until viewing the comprehensive retrospective Mastry. The exhibition infuses me with the pure state of inspiration that comes from well-honed visual thinking, a transmission of power from hand to eye that surges through the works in the show and sends the artist back to the studio post-haste.
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Crowds admiring the unstretched tarp paintings from the mid-1990s at Mastry.
Exhibition Link |
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From 2014, some vignettes. Delightfully, Marshall entertains an adolescent girl as one of his personae,
given his penchant for pink hearts and glittery signatures. Or that's my reading, anyway. |
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Vignette up close: flowers with glitter stamens, a vision close to my heart. |
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These paintings make me feel understood - and I understand them - generational motifs, perhaps, is part of that. But also a privileging of sentiment, overt beauty in imagery perceived in high art as suspect, less than or Other for its decorative rather than structural content. Like much else this is a construct, as we know that flowers can be structural, but in the Modernist grid of New York, the bias remains in visual terms. |
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Graffiti, musical notes, composition from increasing dissonant elements, much like the world, and KJM puts it together. |
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Working the full palette of painting history not to mention pop culture. |
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Infused with a healthy graphic sense, bird, flowers and glitter! From 2014. |
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Large detail of a figure within interior. Beautiful veins of neutrals coursing through deep tones. |
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Here from a larger work, patterns and volumes are slabs, marks and daubs that form bodies in space. |
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Anamorphic perspective, as in Holbein's Ambassadors (1533). Wikipedia_Holbein's Ambassadors. Not the skull of death as that painting, but a cultural whitewash, which the baby ditched his rattle for to investigate. |
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Color: the subtle tones of skin and in this instance, surrounded by a bright, loud landscape. |
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The whole vignette, parts of which were shown above. Circling back. |
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Japanese prints selected by Marshall from the Met's collection as inspirational sources for his own work. As an aside, he also chose Matisse. What is not to love! |
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The storytelling impulse, the sharp transitions from volume to flat space, the color... |
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...gory and graphic, somehow pleasingly arranged |
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A small, Roland Flexner-scale Gerhard Richter, never seen before |
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And Ingres' Odalisque in Grisaille, 1824-34. These do provide insight into his oeuvre. |
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KJM: earlier work, 1990s |
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Multiple painting modalities in Renaissance heads and a rawly painted blanket |
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A love painting |
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KJM often paints on paper assembled together as if identity were constructed - also playing against the elegance of his drawing in this self portrait. |
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More portraits |
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A great barbershop painting that greets you on the third floor |
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The detail is meticulous, observance sharp |
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Spaces within space |
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Color and shape composing rhythm |
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Paper flooring on the backbeat, spats up front |
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Stars and protagonist - the way sound looks, the way dressing up feels |
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Young driver, boyhood reverie |
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The seminal 1993 works showing the bucolic child's world of Nickerson Gardens |
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How I loved these in that year's Biennial: clean script, smeary flowers, geometric homes securely drawn |
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Kids at play in the world. Motifs arise and repeat, like pink thongs. |
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The open-ended landscape of childhood... |
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Welcome, welcome~ |
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And yet synthetic landscape, making no bones about its over construction as a painting |
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That feels quite real, like the jump in sequences in film |
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Marshall's paintings celebrate innocence and its visual construction, without cynicism |
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They don't pretend something doesn't exist, but include everything. |
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Jumps in sequence, as when Mary Poppins jumps through the sidewalk with Dick Van Dyke in the '60s film, hearken to innocence/no innocence in that the world is real, both sweet and bitter |
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America |
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I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America...school children recited this daily in the 1960s |
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In this recent (2016) painting, a life model gives a Black power salute |
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In the opulent make-believe world of the studio |
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A larger studio, inspired by Marshall's first mentor, Charles White, in LA |
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Paintings within paintings ! and systems of logic fall together seamlessly |
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I could get lost in that floor, in those toes, and the light stands. |
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Rorschach paintings - handsome, yet missing the precision of the drawing |
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Something I saw for the first time in Mastry: Chicago influence - a la Ed Paschke in this neon backdrop. Marshall lives in Chicago, but I had never identified the Imagist influence in his work before. |
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This beautiful palette shares a precision and tonality with Jim Nutt's portraits. |
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Close view of Frankenstein and Mrs. Frankenstein - the flip side to KJM's childhood paintings. |
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A series of portraits with strong Japanese influence: |
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really portraits of ow a painting is made, layer by layer, color by color side by side...assembled, built, constructed and realized. |
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How sometimes it can feel like paint by numbers, while other times it's magic improvisation. |
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And another mural-sized painting of Chicago's South Side, in full below. Here, a detail showing prisms caused in camera. |
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The whole painting almost |
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Glitter, texture, pattern - at this point, I was in a swoon ~ |
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Emerging from the black and white world. The glitter, the outre design elements, flowers, bodies - adolescent castaway identity - belongs to men and women. But I don't forget the women. |
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Pattern, image, text, space within space |
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In The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, "Now a guarantee of happiness--that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it." |
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Annunciation from the Past to the Future |
Mastry is funny and Mastery achieved. Congratulations to Kerry James Marshall for one of the best museum shows ever. It's sublime - and pointed, too.