'Mastry (7) is Kerry James Marshall's vast exhibition at the Met Breuer, encompassing more than 70 paintings, an installation of photographs and a group of comic book graphic images from the series Rhythm Mastr.

Marshall's commitment both to black figure representation and to an interrogation of the canon of western painting and the attendant power structures of the museum are brought into forceful conjunction with the heavy modernist architecture of Marcel Breuer's iconic museum building, originally home to the Whitney, between 1966 and 2014.

Embedded in 'Mastr' is Marshall Selects, the artist's pick of specific works from The Met's collection. This exhibition-within-an-exhibition moves from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is a sombre vision of works that inevitably reveals Marshall's response to art historical precedent--from the flattened space of Yoshitoshi's woodblock print Banzuiin Chobei, depicting a world of bloodstained violence, to the marmoreal fixity of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' Odalisque in Grisaille. Marshall describes this work as 'ultra-modern, because it exists as a pure image' (Marshall 2015), referring to both the limited colour palette and the distortion and manipulation of the painted figure, to create a picture that cannot logically be conceived by the viewer as mirroring reality.

'Mastry gives audiences a length-and-breadth chance to reflect on the artist's explicit engagement with racial politics and his mission to affirm the black figure as a central subject within the histories of western painting. It is a cause that admits no deviation across the totality of Marshall's work, one that explores so many different registers--from exuberant celebration to incriminatory critique--in its effort to place blackness as a radical presence within art's master narrative.

Marshall paints his figures in customized variable blacks, a practice that he has evolved into a rule-bound vocabulary of seven tones. Cobalt blue and yellow ochre might be added to mars black, ivory black and carbon black, thus introducing variability within what we understand as black and that might otherwise appear uniform. This acts as an amplification of the artist's mission: 'I am trying to establish a phenomenal presence that is unequivocally black and beautiful' (Marshall 2016: 79).

Many of the paintings are large scale and banner like, fixed framelessly to the wall. The figure is placed into this space, often within elaborate...