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Viewing Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at Royal Academy of Art

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. The 69-year old artist and professor was born in Alabama and grew up in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, close to the Black Panther’s headquarters in the 1960s and the period of race riots and protests across the city at the time would come to instill in Marshall an acute sense of social responsibility and justice.

This sense is keenly felt in Marshall’s figurative paintings, gorgeous, glorious and powerful paintings of Black Americans. Large in scale they cannot be ignored, giving the figures a presence in the hallowed halls of culture they had previously been denied. Referencing art history, civil rights, comics, science fiction and personal memories, Marshall’s works are each enriched by reality and imagination, steeped in allegory. But as the artist once said: “I don’t want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I’m really interested in.”

This anticipated exhibition at the Royal Academy is the largest exhibition ever held on the American artist outside of the US and includes over 70 works made over his career to date, including his giant public commission Knowledge and Wonder (1995) – on loan for the first time.

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Dates
20 September 2025 — 18 January 2026
Head to the captivating Somerset village of Hatch Beauchamp this week to see CLOSE gallery’s newly opened group exhibition, After Nature. Curated by Ben Tufnell, the show explores art made with nature in mind – inspired by its forms, materials and systems, contemplating how to address its infinite mysteries, cycles and inevitable transience.

The show traverses generations, from esteemed sculptors such as Richard Long and David Nash, both celebrated internationally for their evocative use of natural materials, to younger artists including Aimee Parrott, whose paintings and prints capture impressions of the non-linear movements of nature with breathtaking tacility, and new work by Fred Sorrell, whose research-based, abstract compositions evolve from colour studies made ‘in the field’ tracing the sensory experiences of the environment and its unique rhythms through the visual.

Also on view are Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s works simulating the perspective of bees and other pollinators, and Nissa Nishikawa’s ceramics fired with materials sourced from the surrounding landscape. Together – and especially potent against the rural setting surrounding the gallery – the works become a rallying call for environmental and ecological justice, addressing the complexities and fragility of our world, increasingly menaced by political decisions by major world leaders. After Nature invites audiences “to consider how contemporary art can offer new ways of seeing, sensing and engaging with the natural world at a time of urgent ecological change.”

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Dates
13 September 2025 — 25 October 2025
The final stop on our trio of sensational sculptural offerings in the capital this week is the newly opened Sculpture Garden at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Across three acres surrounding the gallery, visitors will find a series of sculptures that will delight, surprise and shed new light on the gallery’s collection and grounds.

The Lovington Sculpture Meadow provides solace and serenity, designed by leading land architect Kim Wilkie, and resplendent with various species. Taking over a field at the south side of the gardens and free to access, it includes a growing forest of 130 Oak, Wild Service and Elm trees, and a plaited land artform, inspired by the Girl at the Window, the 17th century painting by Rembrandt held in the gallery’s collection.

Equally unmissable is Harold Offeh’s Hail the New Prophets, an mythological spaceship, based on jazz musician Sun Ra’s mothership. Encouraging all ages to play, this whimsical and wonderful interactive sculpture is sure to be among visitor’s favourites for years to come.

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