Does Zurich Grasp This Gravitational Moment?
- Tallulah Patricia B
- 18 hours ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
On Kerry James Marshall at the Kunsthaus Zürich
Special thanks to the team at the Kunsthaus Zürich for the invitation to attend the opening evening.
A few days have passed, and I am still searching for the right words…
Who is Kerry James Marshall, and why did several hundred people gather in Zurich to hear him speak?
Inside the auditorium of the Kunsthaus Zürich, the room was full. Applause moved through the audience as the opening remarks concluded and Marshall rose to acknowledge the moment. To an uninitiated visitor, it might have looked like any other museum vernissage. Curators thanked collaborators. Institutions thanked lenders. The familiar choreography of the art world unfolded classically.
And yet something about the evening felt unusually charged. Marshall is widely regarded as one of the most important painters working today. For more than four decades, his work has engaged directly with the long history of Western painting while insisting on something the canon historically excluded: the presence, complexity, and centrality of Black life within it. That tension between tradition and revision was quietly present in the room that night. Marshall himself alluded to it when recalling a formative memory from his early years as an artist.
Travelling to Paris for the first time, he walked through the Louvre and encountered paintings he had previously only seen reproduced in books. Seeing them in person, he explained, was a completely different experience. Scale, texture, presence. Things reproduction cannot convey.
The feeling Marshall described is one many of us recognize. As Black visitors walking through museums like the Tate or MoMA, encountering artists such as him on Swiss walls carries a particular weight. To experience that in a place like Zurich, finally, felt tremendously powerful. Moments like this matter because museums are not neutral spaces. They are institutions that historically determine which artists become part of the story of art and society at large.
And on that evening in Zurich, the story was quietly expanding.
Not because the vernissage itself was emotional in any obvious sense. And not merely because curator and cultural provocatrice Lhaga Koondhor and her Clubhouse team hosted what quickly became the evening’s most talked-about gathering: a cool and vibrant afterparty that carried the energy of the opening late into the night.
Kudos where it is due #Lhaga! <3
The moment that stayed with me arrived later, and still sits with me.
Over dinner with curator Andile Magengelele and soprano artist Angela Kerrison, both creative leaders who have lived and worked in Switzerland for many years, our evening continued to unfold differently. What had first appeared as a successful vernissage gradually revealed deeper questions about context, history and institutional significance.
We spoke about the weight of the exhibition, its intellectual lineage, and the historical tensions that inevitably accompany moments when artistic narratives expand. The conversation returned repeatedly to a single question:
Does Zurich, or Switzerland more broadly, fully grasp what this moment signifies for the art world and for Swiss cultural history?
Because in a structural sense the exhibition of Kerry James Marshall does more than simply introduce a new program cycle at the Kunsthaus Zürich. It reveals a subtle yet consequential shift within the historical architecture of a Swiss museum. The building and structure remains the same. But the story it holds has expanded. And to understand why, it helps to step back.
Historical Context
When the Kunsthaus Zürich opened in 1910, it joined a European museum system built around a relatively stable narrative of art history. Swiss modernism, German expressionism, French avant-garde painting and the various trajectories of abstraction formed the institutional backbone. This narrative was not a coincidence. It was the institutional framework through which art history was organized.It reflected the historical power structures that shaped the canon. And it reflected the intellectual geography through which European museums defined artistic legitimacy during the twentieth century.
African objects were present in Switzerland, but largely through different institutional frameworks. Collections such as those of the Museum Rietberg approached African works historically through ethnography or cross-cultural study rather than through the central narrative of Western painting. Afro-diasporic artists did appear in European exhibitions from time to time — Jean-Michel Basquiat’s presence in Basel in the early 1980s and later retrospectives in Switzerland are notable examples. And still, such figures rarely occupied the central position in the canonical narrative these museums constructed around modern art.
Against that longer institutional timeline, the exhibition “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories,” running at the Kunsthaus Zürich until 16 August 2026, reads differently.
Marshall’s paintings enter the Kunsthaus not as a thematic intervention but as painting in its most traditional sense: beautifully large scale, technically rigorous, fully conscious of the historical language of Western art. Renaissance spatial logic, modernist abstraction, narrative painting, graphic clarity. Even with glitter. His work demonstrates a precise knowledge of how European art history constructed monumentality.
The shift lies in who occupies that monumentality.
Marshall belongs to a generation of artists who did not position themselves outside the Western tradition but studied it closely. During the vernissage he recalled travelling to France as a young artist and entering the Louvre, where he encountered paintings he had previously known only from reproductions. Seeing them in person changed his understanding of painting. The scale, the surface, the physical presence of the works revealed something that books could not convey. That insight has shaped his own practice.
As Marshall himself has said, he seeks to create “arresting images that compel looking and thinking,” images with what he calls an “irresistible presence.”
That experience matters for understanding his work. Marshall’s project has never been simply to critique Western painting from the outside. It has been to work within its grammar and expand its field of subjects. This becomes visible immediately in Zurich. His figures appear at the scale historically reserved for mythological scenes, aristocratic portraits or religious narratives. Yet the subjects are gardens, families, everyday leisure, interior life. Black life appears not as commentary but as the ordinary center of pictorial space.
The architecture of the museum remains unchanged. The marble floors, the proportions of the galleries, the carefully balanced lighting all remain exactly as they have for decades. But what changes is the distribution of visual gravity inside those rooms.
Dinner Conversations: Black Consciousness at the Table
After the vernissage, we crossed the street for a late bite. Over dinner, the conversation moved toward the ideas of Steve Biko and the intellectual tradition of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Andile Magengelele, one of the most intellectually precise art historians I have yet encountered, unpacked its foundations for us. Emerging in apartheid South Africa during the late 1960s and 1970s, Black Consciousness was not only a political strategy but a psychological intervention. Its central premise was simple yet radical: liberation begins the moment one refuses to internalize the structures of inferiority imposed by the dominant gaze.
Seen through that lens, Marshall’s paintings can be read less as protest images than as an aesthetic posture. His figures are not depicted as reacting to oppression. They appear composed, self-possessed, and unhurried. The assumption of centrality is already present within the work itself.
The conversation also moved toward the earlier literary and philosophical tradition of Négritude, developed by writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Négritude proposed that Black identity was not a deficit relative to European civilization but an aesthetic and intellectual contribution in its own right.
Marshall’s work echoes that logic visually. His distinctive use of a deep black pigment absorbs light rather than reflecting it. His work echoes the spectrum of black and Blackness. The surface does not attempt to approximate lighter tonal conventions historically used to represent Black figures within European painting. Instead, blackness becomes the organizing principle of the canvas. Placed inside a museum such as Kunsthaus Zürich, built around centuries of European art historical continuity, this painterly decision becomes historically significant.
The institution itself does not change overnight. One exhibition cannot rewrite a century of curatorial practice. But moments like this undoubtedly reveal how museums evolve: not through grand declarations, but through creative leadership and through shifts in what they allow to occupy central space.
And who they feel invited to enter their spaces.
This is why the exhibition resonates beyond the immediate context of Zurich.
Museums are among the institutions that produce and re-produce cultural legitimacy. They determine which artistic codes and languages are preserved, which artists are studied, and which visual traditions become part of collective historical memory. When a major Swiss institution positions an artist like Marshall at the center of its galleries, it signals an expansion of that memory.
Learning and unlearning at the same time.
Another striking aspect of the exhibition is how natural the paintings look in the rooms.
They do not feel like an intervention. They feel soft and structurally fluent. And perhaps that too is real historical significance. For much of the twentieth century, the question in European museums was whether Black artists would be included at all.
Standing in the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2026, the question has shifted. The paintings are already there. The rooms hold them comfortably. The narrative of art history, at least for a moment, appears slightly wider than before. That widening may prove to be temporary or durable.
Only time will show...
But it is enough to create a gravitational moment. And once the center of gravity moves, even slightly, the architecture of a museum can never be read in quite the same way again.
About the Exhibition
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at Kunsthaus Zürich | 27 February – 16 August 2026. The exhibition presents key works from across Kerry James Marshall’s practice and examines how the artist engages with Western painting traditions while expanding the visual language of contemporary art.
Further information on the exhibition and accompanying public program:
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