Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
11 May 2015
Kerry James Marshall at the 2014 Wolfgang Hahn-Prize Award Ceremony in the Museum Ludwig, in front of the work acquired for the Museum, Vignette #15, 2014. © Kerry James Marshall and the Museum Ludwig. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jürgen Schulzki.
Art in Context is a lecture series organized by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig e.V.
What significance does the representation and reflection of black American identity have in the Western canon of art or in contemporary museums, globally? Kerry James Marshall’s socially engaged paintings, collages, sculptures, animations, and videos deal intensively with these questions. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and raised in the direct vicinity of the local Black Panther Party headquarters in Los Angeles, Marshall experienced the historical moment of the black liberation and civil rights movements in the 1960s. Guest juror Elena Filipovic, then senior curator at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, now director of the Kunsthalle Basel, has called the artist, “a painter’s painter as much as he is an astute social critic” in her laudation on the occasion of awarding the Wolfgang Hahn-Prize to Marshall in 2014. Alternating between realism, abstraction, and pop culture, his works depict the most diverse, idyllic as well as everyday, moments from the life of the black American populace in the US. They reveal new perspectives and in the process consciously and in a technically versed manner engage and respond to art historical traditions.
Now, at the Museum Ludwig, in one of his rare and highly popular lectures and for the first time in Germany, Kerry James Marshall offers personal insight into his complex oeuvre.
Kerry James Marshall studied art at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and at Documenta X and XII in Kassel, and is represented in leading international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2014 Marshall was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn-Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst. His Vignette #15 (2014), purchased for the Museum Ludwig, is Marshall’s first work in a European museum collection.
Monday, May 11, 2015, 7pm
Lecture in English
Museum Ludwig
Auditorium
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne
Germany
