"There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art, because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise. It is art that conveys feelings."

 - Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine 

Kerry James Marshall

(c)image: M HKA
Untitled, 1998-1999
Print , 12 x (250 x 122 cm)
ink, paper

In many of Marshall’s paintings, the space is construed as a stage. In his twelve-part woodcut, *Untitled*, it becomes cinematic. The work is 50-feet long, too large to take-in at a single glance. Here Marshall introduces a cinematic approach to a static medium. The work reads from left to right, as a story and a filmed image. Our eyes glide over its length like a camera on a dolly. We are the camera. The scene is set in the first panel: the architecture of a high-rising urban landscape, the corner of a building, a window with flowers. We enter from over an outside wall, where six men are deep in conversation in a tidy living room. He uses this filmic intermezzo as proof of the objectivity of his panorama. He deliberately draws our attention from the action in the living room to the intermediary space and the open door of the bedroom. It is a simple pictorial work, in contrast to some of the artist's large history paintings. The apartment and the men are intentionally anonymous and generic. *Untitled* is a powerful image, owing not only to its scale but to its subdued naturalism as well.