Kerry James Marshall, De Style, 1993, acrylic and collage on canvas, 264.2 x 309.9cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Ruth and Jacob Bloom. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

HOW refreshing to hear from an acclaimed artist a statement that rings so unashamedly true.

The latest to have their work fill the Main Galleries at the Royal Academy*, Kerry James Marshall says of his largest show to have been mounted outside the United States: “I don’t think you will go… and find a wider variety of different ways in which black people are represented in anybody else’s exhibition, anywhere else in the world.”

Some, of course, may remember his first solo show in Europe, Along the Way, 20 years ago at Camden Arts Centre in Hampstead.

Marshall turned 70 a couple of weeks back and while The Histories is not particularly billed as a retrospective, the 70 plus pieces are, whether large or small, fittingly impressive and “monumental” as both commentary and artworks.

Better known for the bigger pieces, his 1995 commission for the City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago public library, Knowledge and Wonder, never loaned before, is included here.

Yet the show starts with more intimate paintings, where, with others, we see A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self from 1980 and, from six years later, The Invisible Man. The former, egg tempera on paper, is seen as a breakthrough piece for Marshall, with a black figure on black background with just teeth, shirt and “whites of the eyes” prominent; the latter is an acrylic with the title taken from a 1952 Ralph Ellison book in which an unnamed protagonist “is rendered invisible in a racially divided American society because people ‘refuse to see’ him”.

As the RA says, Marshall uses the “Western tradition of history painting and makes visible those people who were so noticeably absent in the works that came before him.”

And the range of comment takes in not only his experi­ence – born in Birmingham, Alabama, later moving to the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles just before the 1965 riots there, now based in Chicago – but so much more.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled, 2009, acrylic on PVC panel, 155.3 x 185.1cm, Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979. © Kerry James Marshall

And a cornerstone of the work is the way he depicts his subjects. He paints black people with black paint. As he explains: “I try to make the black paints that I use as complex as any other colour that would be on the palette.

“I can have at least eight or nine different variations on the colour black and I can use those different variations of black to model the figure, to give the figures volume, so that they don’t read just as flat… these figures have to have dimensions, and those differences, chromatically, make a huge difference in the way people perceive the image in the picture.”

Make no mistake, however, Marshall masters all his colours spectacularly well.

And, perhaps with some irony, the RA is using his untitled 2009 work with its 20th-century “painting by numbers” allusion (see below) for its publicity.

Marshall’s references are not necessarily subtle, but rather to the point.

In De Style, set in a barber shop, for example, there’s a nod to both 17th-century Dutch paintings and the work of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), but a calendar on the wall dates the scene to 1991, the year Rodney King was brutally beaten by officers of the LAPD!

The Histories plays pointedly with history and perceptions of it. So there’s a “Portrait of Nat Turner”, who led a bloody 1831 uprising, which includes “…the Head of His Master” severed, on the bed, Turner axe in hand; remember Judith with the head of Holofernes?

And, in a departure in terms of the number of non-black figures within it, he gives us Untitled (London Bridge), the one that’s now in Arizona. Here, among the crowd, a man with a sandwich board advertises “Olaudah’s Fish & Chips”. And Olaudah Equiano, who was taken from Africa to the Americas and would play an important role in the Abolition movement, features elsewhere in the exhibition.

Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister is another large-scale painting among a number of works completed in the last couple of years.

A fine show catalogue, examining a wide range of Marshall’s output includes images of Now and Forever, the stained glass windows he created for the Washington National Cathedral in DC in 2023.

• Kerry James Marshall: The Histories* runs at Burlington House, Piccadilly, until January 18. The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.