6 Unforgettable Works in Kerry James Marshall’s Royal Academy Show

Over the course of 11 themed rooms, “The Histories,” a major survey of Kerry James Marshall’s work at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, demonstrates why the Chicago-based figurative painter is one of the most respected and well-known artists working today. “All of the paintings show Black subjects, and Kerry, in his own words, is unapologetic about centering Black figures and engaging with the history of art,” said the show’s curator, Mark Godfrey.

For over four decades, Marshall has placed Black bodies in everyday settings, using history painting to challenge how Western art has often excluded and dehumanized Black people. He has since become known for his large-scale works combining art historical and Black cultural references. “When I started out, my goal was to figure out how to make the most sophisticated paintings I could,” he told Artsy. “I want people to come back time and again, and each time to see something new they hadn’t noticed before.”

To celebrate the exhibition, which is on view through January 18, 2026, Artsy highlights some of Marshall’s most iconic works on display in the London show.

At just eight inches tall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) is considered a pivotal turning point in Marshall’s artistic career. The piece marks Marshall’s shift from mixed-media abstract collages to painting Black figures in everyday settings.

Taking cues from painters such as Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt, Marshall used the practice of self-portraiture to signal his new direction. As he told art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in the exhibition catalogue for “The Histories,” the piece exemplifies “my escape from the limitations and the projections that accompany stereotypical representations of Black people.”

Created on paper in egg tempera when he was only 25, the piece depicts the artist himself as a jet-black figure in a black coat against a black backdrop. Almost invisible, the man is brought to life by the whites of his eyes, his mischievous wide-toothed grin revealing one missing tooth and pink gums, and a white shirt underneath.

Decades after he created this work, the artist is still painting figures with pure black skin, though they are now rendered with more depth and dimension. “Black [in this way] is not reductive,” he told Artsy. “It’s a statement of complexity, because I make the blacks as rich as I possibly can.” For Marshall, using black in this way works to emphasize that his subjects are not real but “rhetorical figures” in realist spaces.

In 1984, the collector Steven Lebowitz bought the painting for $850, hanging it in a bar at his home. As a painting reflecting on historical racist stereotypes, many guests found it offensive out of context, prompting him to move the piece to a bathroom. It stayed there for over 25 years, until he and his wife gifted it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019.

De Style (1993) was the first of Marshall’s works to be acquired by a major museum, also purchased in 2019 by LACMA for around $12,000, according to the artist. This milestone aligned with Marshall’s intentions to insert Black figures into the Western canon of art history. At nearly 8 and a half by 10 feet, it was his largest work to date and set a precedent for many of the works he would later become known for.

Set in a Los Angeles barbershop (named Percy’s House of Style, according to the window sign), De Style depicts five Black men, four of them facing the viewer. Three wait, and one sits in a chair as the barber cuts his hair. Like many of his works today, the piece draws on several aspects of Western art history. The men’s placid stares echo Rembrandt’s De Staalmeesters (1662), where six men—five drapers and an attendant—look up from their work to acknowledge the viewer. The large mirror behind Marshall’s figures echoes Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), and the primary colors of the barbershop cabinet alongside the piece’s title nod to Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl movement, founded in 1917.

For many Black communities across the globe, a barbershop is a haven. In an interview with The New Yorker, Marshall noted that young Black men of his generation were enchanted by the blaxploitation movies of the ’70s, low- to mid-budget films featuring black protagonists in action-oriented roles. He recalled that this meant “guys were spending as much on their hair as girls did.” “My brother and I did each other’s hair,” he noted. Marshall brings the piece into contemporary events by depicting a calendar marking April 1991. This was the month after Rodney King, a Black man, was brutally beaten by the Los Angeles police.

In the early 1990s, Marshall created several works about the transatlantic slave trade, focusing on its enduring impact often through metaphor and depicting contemporary settings. In Plunge (1992), for instance, a woman in a bikini prepares to dive into a pool where a swimmer appears to be drowning. Voyager (1992) shows two partially obscured figures aboard a small vessel called Wanderer, which was named after a slave ship that illegally transported people from Africa to Georgia in 1858. Meanwhile, Great America (1994), which takes its name from a Californian theme park, illustrates a group of figures on a boat ride heading towards a haunted tunnel.

In 2011, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired Great America, and two years on, it became the centerpiece for their solo exhibition “In the Tower: Kerry James Marshall.” The idea for the piece emerged from the 1993 film Sankofa, directed by the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima. Marshall worked on the movie as a production designer. The story follows an African American model on a photoshoot in Ghana who is transported to the 18th century and forced aboard a slave ship.

In this work, Marshall reimagines the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans traveling to the Americas in an amusement park setting, featuring a dinghy and haunted house ghouls. One man, submerged in the water, appears to have fallen out of the small boat—a scene often likened to John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), depicting a true account of a 14-year-old, Brook Watson, being mauled by a shark after falling overboard.

When Past Times was sent to auction in 2018, the piece sold for nearly 800 times more than the Chicago Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA) had originally paid. The corporation bought the piece directly from Marshall in 1997 for $25,000 and consigned it to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $8 million–$12 million. The painting ultimately sold for $21 million, making it the highest auction price ever achieved for a work by a living Black artist at the time.

Often compared to French Impressionist Georges Seurat’s portrayals of working-class and petit-bourgeois leisure, Past Times offers a scene of Black respite in a Chicago park. In the foreground, his figures play croquet and listen to music on a red-checkered blanket. Around them, people go golfing, boating, and water skiing.

The record-breaking sale not only cemented Marshall’s place as one of the most important artists alive today but also fueled a renewed interest in Black figurative art among artists, collectors, and institutions alike.

In 2020, two years after Marshall made Untitled (Underpainting), The Washington Post hailed it as “a tour de force by a painter at the top of his game.” The painting, which presents two nearly identical scenes of Black visitors in a gallery space, sold for $7.3 million, three times its high estimate, at Sotheby’s the year prior.

The 10-foot-tall diptych is divided by two white stripes, evoking a gallery wall and creating the effect of two separate panels. On both sides, a busy museum is filled entirely with Black exhibition-goers, including cross-legged children. The scenes contradict the idea of museums and galleries being unwelcome spaces for marginalized groups, transforming them into places where Black visitors feel at home.

The artist first showcased Untitled (Underpainting) at David Zwirner’s London gallery in 2018, in an exhibition of new works titled “History of Painting.” Unlike the vibrant works Marshall was known for at this point, the piece presented a scene almost entirely in shades of taupe. This unique approach harkened back to traditional art academies where students created underpaintings in gray or earth tones. “I’ve always been interested in unfinished underpaintings, like Leonardo’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,” Marshall told Apollo Magazine the following year. “That’s how I learned how paintings were constructed, from those sorts of works.”