ART REVIEW

Engaging Prints: Kerry James Marshall’s tough, complex paintings delving into African American culture, history and media representation have reached wide audiences lately, but his woodcut prints, now on view in an absorbing show at Koplin Gallery, haven’t made the rounds as widely. They are engaging in their own right and as rawer, more distilled versions of the subjects Marshall tackles in his narrative paintings.

The prints date from 1982 to 1989 and, like Marshall’s paintings, address black stereotypes with their blacker-than-black figures whose teeth and eyes often provide the only distinguishing reprieve from their dark silhouettes. Ten of the prints represent Yoruba deities who are worshiped throughout the African diaspora, often in forms syncretically fused with the Catholic saints. In Marshall’s image, Eschu, the spirit of the crossroads, bears a cross upon his forehead, a layered reference to both his function in the Yoruba pantheon and his subjugation to Christian iconology.

Marshall, formerly of L.A. and living for the past decade in Chicago, invests his woodcuts with vigor and the emotional urgency of his German Expressionist predecessors. His images of a harmonica player are simple and rich, showing simply a face with hands folded as if to silence the mouth but in actuality freeing the song. In “Once I Was Blind, Now I Can See,” an image of compact force, Marshall incises a rainbow of scraggly lines linking the figure’s eyes, as if closing a circuit, both visual and spiritual.

*

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Dec. 31.