A distinct Tuesday mood, conjured up by the brilliant American figurative painter Kerry James Marshall. In this work, titled Nude (Spotlight), Marshall’s subject adopts the pose of Edouard Manet’s Olympia, one of art history’s most famous paintings, whose white central figure is pictured alongside a Black servant. Here, the central figure is Black, the servant noticeably absent. The work is a vivid example of what critic Kobena Mercer has described as Marshall’s signature “rhetorical blackness”; its protagonist is “a vividly different kind of character [whom Marshall has brought] into dialogue with the canonical lexicon of art history”, in the words of ART | library deco.
