Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) - Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Rollerblades). (2022) In the Pinault Collection. Shown at the temporary exhibition "Corps et Âmes [Bodies and Souls]" at Collection Pinault, Bourse de Commerce, Paris.
An exquisite corpse is an old-fashioned parlour game in which a person starts a drawing, folds it to hide what has been drawn and passes the sheet on to the next person. When all the game players have contributed, the final result is revealed, often to hilarious effect.
Writing in The Brooklyn Rail, Amber Jamilla Musser offer some helpful observations about this picture.
"In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Rollerblades) (2022) a blonde woman with bangs and bouffant hairdo reclines on a mint pillow, eyes looking toward stardust swirling above her in a pink bedroom. Below her neck, her loungewear and skin make a study in grays accented with black puffs of fur at the shoulders and wrists while her long fingers and pink nails idly consider a necklace that resembles bones. At her waist, the portrait shifts perspective to show a crosshatched nude bottom facing the viewer, but in the final black-and-white section we see legs and feet firmly ensconced in roller blades, no bedroom or any other backdrop in sight. Read from left to right, each vertical cleavage announces a distinct painterly approach to the subject with its own emotional and representational baggage. The lush, dark realism of the first two segments emphasizes the imaginative possibilities of going more deeply into blackness, of revealing intelligence and complexity. The third segment offers a twist in both posture and approach. Its fine lines recall early modern anatomical drawings, not only because of its emphasis on musculature, but also because it focuses on that overdetermined site of scientific fixation—the buttocks of a Black woman. The flat style of the fourth segment, meanwhile, slides toward the comic in its extravagant attention to the incongruous rollerblades—footwear not usually associated with lying in bed."
For another picture by Kerry James Marshall click here