Until August 16, the Kunsthaus Zürich is presenting a retrospective of one of the most important contemporary painters, the American artist Kerry James Marshall. The exhibition, which was successfully shown last year at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, has arrived in Zurich as part of a European tour and will subsequently travel to Paris. This marks the first large-scale project devoted to Marshall’s work in Switzerland.
Marshall (b. 1955) is an artist whose monumental canvases — some extending up to seven metres in width — captivate at first glance with their rich colour and virtuosic technique. Yet beneath this visual richness lies a sustained engagement with the Western canon, from Giotto and Édouard Manet to Georges Seurat and Gustave Caillebotte. Marshall does not illustrate political theses; rather, he raises questions that the viewer may not have previously considered. “I never think of artworks as having a quality that’s intended to mobilize people to action,” the artist has noted. “They don’t make people do things. But they do put questions in the mind of a viewer that they may not have entertained before.”
At the centre of Marshall’s practice lies the question of visibility. From an early age, he observed the absence of Black figures in classical painting, where their place remained empty or marginal. Since the mid-1980s, he has made it his method to fill these gaps, working within the most prestigious genres — portraiture, scenes of everyday life, and history painting. His protagonists — members of the African American community — occupy the centre of the composition with a confidence previously reserved for European courts or bourgeois interiors.
Marshall’s visual language is immediately recognizable. One of his signature strategies is the use of a dense, near-monochrome black, through which the contours of the figures emerge only gradually. The painting A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self alludes to the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Marshall often works in series, each addressing a distinct theme. A significant part of the exhibition is devoted to works inspired by everyday life. School of Beauty, School of Culture unfolds as a scene set in a hair salon, while the artist’s largest canvas, Knowledge and Wonder, presents a library as a kind of a cosmic elevator towards progress.
Marshall’s visual language is immediately recognizable. One of his signature strategies is the use of a dense, near-monochrome black, through which the contours of the figures emerge only gradually. The painting A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self alludes to the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Marshall often works in series, each addressing a distinct theme. A significant part of the exhibition is devoted to works inspired by everyday life. School of Beauty, School of Culture unfolds as a scene set in a hair salon, while the artist’s largest canvas, Knowledge and Wonder, presents a library as a kind of a cosmic elevator towards progress.
Drawing freely from different periods and cultural traditions — from Afrofuturism to Congolese nkisi ritual figures embedded with nails — Marshall constructs a layered visual vocabulary. One of the most notable works in the exhibition is the installation Wake, a black boat with chains and fishing nets, surrounded by medallions bearing portraits of Black activists, writers, and musicians. With each iteration, the artist adds new elements, as if building a cumulative, almost ritual memory within the object.
Marshall’s influence on contemporary art is considerable. A decisive moment came with his retrospective in 2016, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — one of the first major museum retrospectives dedicated to a living Black artist in the United States. Without his pioneering approach to representation, it would be difficult to imagine an entire generation of artists, including Amoako Boafo, Zanele Muholi, Kehinde Wiley, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Dates: February 27 — August 16, 2026
Place: Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland
Place: Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland
Cover photo: 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. Jack Hems