With early chatter that the Royal Academy’s “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories” exhibition is a major hit, it’s notable that a couple of Marshall works have made it to the show floor of Frieze London.
The first, at Alexander Gray Associates, is the 1992 painting A Woman with a Heart of Gold, on offer for $2.9 million. The painting centers on a dark-skinned figure rendered against a deep green field, their face half-obscured by radiating clock numerals and a halo-like lattice. Around them float four portraits of blonde women, each framed by thin white borders and smeared with paint.
The collage—built from Harlequin romance novel covers—turns kitsch into critique, exposing the racial fantasies embedded in mass-market desire. The effect is both tender and unsettling. It’s Marshall at his sharpest—both playful and precise.
David Zwirner, which has represented the artist with Jack Shainman since 1994, has a more restrained work on view, the 1990 painting A Little Romance.
In the foreground is a reclining figure with his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes dreamily pointed toward the sky. Two disembodied heads float above his—perhaps they are his parents, or imaginary figures he has dreamt up. Yellow patches dot the rest of the painting, like floating lanterns, over a blue blackground topped with white-cloudlike formations. The paint reads as muddy in places, and the busyness seems to distract, more than focus the viewer.
Kerry James Marshall, A Little Romance (1990) at David Zwirner
As for that Royal Academy show, more than a few raved to me about it. “I’ve been four times in four consecutive days,” one dealer said. A Sotheby’s rainmaker told ARTnews he’d been three times already and was planning another visit. “It’s in the air… in the ether…” said Alexander Gray. “That show reinforces that fact London is a destination. Great shows go up during Frieze.”
The show is starting to feel as buzzy as the fair for the internationals flying in. The way Marshall paints history seems to pack an extra punch when it’s shown in London, the center of what was once the world’s largest empire. People just keep going back.
