Kerry James Marshall
(c) Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Joseph and Jory Shapiro Fund by exchange
7am Sunday Morning (2003) references Edward Hopper’s painting Early Sunday Morning (1930).
Like Hopper, Marshall presents a scene from everyday life in the early morning. 7am Sunday Morning is a large painting on unstretched canvas which contains the large distortion of a lens-flare. Various visual planes overlap each other. On the one side there is the neighborhood of Marshall’s studio as calm and serene, while on the other there is a visual effect of refracted light that is descriptive of a photographic image. The relative lack of activity and the soft tints of colour give this painting a tranquility, something that rather contrasts with the neighbourhood's more animated daily reality.