As his monumental canvases arrive at Kunsthaus Zürich, the American artist continues to ask who gets written into history, who gets erased, and who benefits from the story being told
Kerry James Marshall has never treated painting as decoration. For him, the canvas is a place where history can be reopened, complicated, and made uncomfortable again.
The American artist, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, has brought his major exhibition The Histories to Kunsthaus Zürich, where his large-scale works continue a career-long project: placing Black figures at the centre of images from which they were too often excluded. The show is part of a wider European presentation of Marshall’s work, following its Royal Academy run in London and continuing the artist’s long engagement with the grand tradition of history painting.
But Marshall’s work is not interested in easy correction. He is not simply filling a blank space in the museum with heroic counter-images. His paintings are denser, stranger, and more difficult than that. They ask what it means to inherit a visual culture built through empire, slavery, beauty, desire, leisure, violence, and wealth — and what happens when the people once pushed to the margins take command of the picture.
That complexity is central to The Histories. Marshall has described himself as a history painter, but his understanding of history is not clean or consoling. In his world, history is not a single official narrative. It is a field of competing stories, buried connections, private choices, public myths, and moral contradictions. His paintings refuse the comfort of dividing the past neatly into innocent victims and obvious villains.
This is what gives the work its charge. Marshall’s Black figures are not symbolic placeholders. They are vivid, composed, stylish, knowing, and sometimes implicated. They occupy domestic interiors, gardens, pools, public spaces, and historical scenes with a presence that is at once ordinary and monumental. His black pigments are famously layered and complex, turning blackness itself into a field of variation rather than a flat category.
The result is painting that feels both seductive and accusatory. Marshall understands beauty, but he does not use it as an escape route. Colour, scale, composition, and elegance become ways of holding the viewer in place long enough for the harder questions to arrive. Who gets remembered? Who gets turned into an image? Who is allowed leisure, glamour, dignity, desire? And who paid the price for those freedoms?
At Kunsthaus Zürich, those questions land with particular force. Marshall is working inside the language of the museum, but also against it — taking the inherited grammar of Western painting and bending it towards lives, histories, and bodies it failed to honour. His work does not ask politely for inclusion. It behaves as if it already belongs there, because it does.
That may be why Marshall’s paintings feel so powerful now. They do not offer history as a lesson already learned. They present it as something still active, still unresolved, still sitting in the room with us.
