Art review Epic exhibition by pre-eminent painter of black American life

Biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious, Kerry James Marshall's The Histories is the largest show of the black American's work ever held in Europe.

- Adrian Searle

Its effects are cumulative. The Histories charts the 69-year-old painter's intellectual and practical development, his themes and his switches of media and focus.

Everything is here for a reason.

Marshall's art is engaging from the first. He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage, from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall. He paints scenes of kidnappings and of enslavement in Africa and of a black cop sitting on the hood of his squad car, the jagged stylised flare of the streetlights in the background.

Marshall knows that everything is contended and complex and that there are no innocent images.

Pustules of paint decorate the spaces between the housing projects, like flowers blooming in a riot. On an idyllic day in the park, black people picnic, play croquet, water-ski on the lake and listen to the Temptations, the lyrics floating up like ticker tape from radios on a sunny afternoon. It is an absurd, impossible image. The humour in Marshall's art is not to be underestimated.