When Marshall painted A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self in 1980, it protested the lack of Black faces to be found in figurative art: the face staring out is entirely in silhouette bar two eyes and a wide smile that plays off racist caricature. It’s taken 40 years, but now Marshall’s influence can be felt globally, with Black figuration a dominant genre of current times. Consequently Marshall’s work can be found at any given time in a group show acknowledging Black artmaking: this year there was Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at Art Institute of Chicago; The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at National Portrait Gallery, London (travelling to The Box, Plymouth; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh); and Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy, London (at which he showed Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, 2007, a refiguring of the eponymous, enslaved African-American artist into art history). Marshall’s participation in this last is a prelude to a solo exhibition at the institution next year.