MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

With respect to form, content and meaning, Marshall's Who 's Afraid of Red, Black and Green series harks back to Barnett Newman's (1905-1970) Who 's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (1966 /67). Marshall trades the three primary colors for the political tricolor red, black and green - the colors of the Pan-African flag. This tricolor, still today used as an emblem for "Black Power", was designed in 1920 by Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. In the exhibition, the three monumental paintings Red, Black and Green hang next to each other, according to the flag's design.

In this series Marshall refers to the aesthetic characteristics of Color Field painting, like flatness, nuanced planes of color and the perceptual directness of experiencing large formats. But he questions this current's handling of the absolute and the infinite, and contrasts this with different forms of representation and figuration. On the one hand, he examines the materiality of paint in all its subtlety, while on the other hand colors - both in concrete and symbolic terms - refer to political and cultural experiences of being Black.

We see another example of the way that Marshall plays with clashing levels of meaning in Red (If They Come in the Morning). The direct experiencing of the color red is marked by the gradual appearance of the words 'If They Come in the Morning'. Their origin is from an open letter by author and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) to jailed activist Angela Davis. In the 1960s, Davis was a leading Communist Party member and in 1970 was accused of murder, a charge she was able to disprove only after spending 16 months in prison. “For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night," was Baldwin's closing sentence.

By bringing together strong ideas and concepts from different sources, Marshall changes the power of color into a power of social significance.