Kerry James Marshall - The Histories

Some artists paint the world as they find it. Others spend their lives questioning who has been allowed to appear in it. Kerry James Marshall belongs unmistakably to the second category.

From 18 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris will present The Histories, the first exhibition in France devoted to the American artist. Bringing together 70 works spanning more than four decades, including eight new paintings created especially for the exhibition, it offers an extraordinary opportunity to encounter one of the most influential painters of his generation.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and raised in Los Angeles, Marshall has spent his career confronting one of the great absences of Western art history: the underrepresentation of Black people within its images, narratives and traditions. But his paintings are never simply illustrations of this absence. They are ambitious, sensual and deeply intelligent acts of reclamation.

Marshall places Black figures at the centre of monumental compositions, giving them the scale and presence historically reserved for subjects considered worthy of grand painting. A domestic interior, a beauty salon, a park or an ordinary encounter can suddenly acquire the visual authority of history painting. The everyday becomes monumental.

This is one of the most extraordinary qualities of his work. His paintings ask us to recognise the beauty and complexity of lives that have too often been marginalised by the traditional canon, while simultaneously demonstrating that Black experience does not need to exist outside art history it can reshape the history of art itself.

Marshall's figures are immediately recognisable. Their extraordinarily deep black skin, created through carefully developed combinations of pigments, becomes almost architectural against intensely coloured backgrounds. The effect is striking: rather than allowing the figure to disappear into the composition, Marshall makes presence impossible to ignore.

Yet his paintings are not confined to questions of identity or representation. His visual universe is remarkably broad. European painting, nineteenth-century French art, popular culture, comic books, science fiction and Afrofuturism all enter into his language. He can borrow the composition of a classical painting and completely transform its meaning simply by changing who occupies the picture.

The exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne follows this evolution through eleven chronological and thematic groups, beginning with works from the 1980s and continuing to the present. Among the early works is Invisible Man from 1986, inspired by Ralph Ellison's celebrated novel, while later paintings explore subjects ranging from everyday contemporary life to the traditions and institutions of Western art.

One of the central works is The Academy from 2012, in which a male model in a life-drawing class raises his fist in a Black Power salute. It is a perfect example of Marshall's ability to take a familiar artistic tradition and quietly overturn its assumptions.

The final part of the exhibition becomes even more significant. Eight new paintings explore lesser-known episodes of African history, with several works addressing the transatlantic slave trade and the complex roles played by Africans in the sale of enslaved people to European merchants. These paintings extend Marshall's interest in history while refusing to reduce it to a simple narrative.

What makes The Histories so compelling is precisely this complexity. Marshall does not ask us simply to look at his paintings as political statements. He asks us to look at them as paintings — to consider composition, colour, beauty, tradition, humour and desire — and then to realise that all of these things are inseparable from the question of who gets represented and remembered.

For collectors and anyone interested in contemporary painting, this is an exhibition that deserves particular attention. Marshall demonstrates that painting can still engage with enormous historical questions without sacrificing beauty or visual pleasure. His canvases are intellectually demanding, but they are also immediately seductive.

After exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Kunsthaus Zürich, The Histories arrives in Paris as the final European chapter of a major international presentation of Marshall's work.

If you are in Paris this autumn, make time for Kerry James Marshall. At the Musée d’Art Moderne, his paintings offer something increasingly rare: the feeling that you are not simply looking at contemporary art, but witnessing an artist actively expanding the possibilities of what painting and art history itself  can contain.