Laundry Man

A smiling African-American man in a laundromat, doing his laundry, turns his head away as if attracted by something outside the frame that we cannot make out. This image could be from an advertising poster or a pop art painting.

Kerry James Marshall depicts his subject in a laundromat. The tension between the deep black of the figure's face and the white of the laundry structures this large-format composition. The human figure is central to the pictorial practice of the African-American artist Kerry James Marshall: he develops a reflection on the Black condition in the United States. He endeavours to give a place and a “physical presence to the women and men who were made invisible for centuries.”

The question of colour—black, in particular—is central to the artist's research, who uses it in all its variations, mixing the pigments of iron oxides and ivory black to restore their intensity and their ability to absorb light.

This painting by Kerry James Marshal is presented for the first time by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition "Ouverture" at the Bourse de Commerce in 2021.