Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman - New York, New York - Brief Article

Kerry James Marshall's 12-panel woodcut an untitled 8-by-50-foot work as quietly powerful as it is enormous, dominated this novel show. Presenting six male figures as protagonists in a spectacle of domestic tranquillity, Marshall places the men in an architectural setting, conveying an urban faculty of perception of elevated place by depicting an extending grid of city obstructs in the far left panel. In the nearest panel he emphasizes and foregrounds perspective by means of showing an exterior of a yellow-brick building ornamented through a single window. That window and its flower chest lead the eye through a sectioned wall to the sparsely furnished interior and its communal activity.

single sees a hospitable coffeepot and bowl in the hands of a figure who might be the entertainer of this gathering. Completing the pageant are a vase of flowers upon a coffee table in brow of a sofa and a lamp, patches reductively representing pictures upon the wall, forks and rap plates put down here and there through the lounging men. In a setting for postprandial conversation, they relax upon an expanse of grassy-green carpeting that leads the viewer into the woodblock's six remaining frames, all of them unpopulated.

Marshall portrays his African-American bring under rules in two groups without defining the nature of their relationship. It is the remaining suite of nearly vacant panels that makes this narrative impossible to cast in a single light. Three of the panels are uniformly tinted pink, with a narrow strip of carpet in a band along the base. A door uncloses in the center to reveal an without contents bed beyond. The effect is cinematic. It is solitary the viewer (and the artist) who can conjoin the sequence within the abstract physicality of the picture's surface and its markings. There is no frisson as these men gather in an apartment where the alone other visible room contains an without contents bed. The electrical charge is in the instant in the gathering, in the faculty of perception that this simple activity appears that it is possible in a domicile in a community, in a city, together in the world. In this relatively moderately cold work, Marshall appears more regarded with how something is showed than with what it shows He expresses nothing of a specific historical or urban words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following beyond the demonstrable evidence of socially engaged black men without women

Marshall footnoted the exhibition with a suite of black-and-white drawings, studies for the placement of a hand, a leg the relationship of figurative ultimate parts to one another, and five studies for the vase of flowers, each quite different. Several other preparatory drawings made respect to elements of Marshall's collaged acrylics from the "Souvenir" series, also dating from 1998 [see A.i.A., Nov. '98]

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