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Kerry James Marshall, an artist who grew up both devouring and scrutinising the Western art historical canon, has never been coy about his artistic ambitions: inscribing the black figure in the history of painting – a counter-archive of sorts aimed at correcting its painfully obvious exclusion History of Painting is precisely the title of his second presentation at the London branch of David Zwirner, which gathers 13 new paintings completed this year Most of these are acutely observed depictions of everyday vignettes within the realist tradition: a woman walking a dog in the street, or a man hanging from the branch of a tree gazing out into a wetland In another canvas, a woman prances just out of the shower, clad only in a pair of stripy panties and a towel in her hair as she chooses an outfit for the evening   Garments and design features tell us these are contemporary scenes, exploring the African American vernacular with a pop touch But spend a little more time in front of them and the modern veneer morphs into something much more classical, both in terms of motif and composition The bather, for example, is a trope that has fascinated painters across centuries – from Rembrandt, who in 1654 painted both ‘Bathsheba at Her Bath and Woman bathing in a Stream’, to Edgar Degas, who in the decade between 1885 and 1895 compulsively painted women at their ablutions Portraits of sitters with their dogs, typically aristocrats and nobles, have also been an Old Masters staple, just as much as the semblance of a young man seizing the landscape became a recurrent topic for the Romantics   The centrepiece of this exhibition, ‘Untitled (Underpainting)’, has been installed upstairs The large canvas presents a scene in a museum, where an educator is passionately explaining a painting to a group of children In a dynamic gesture lovingly captured, her fingers are pointing at the canvas, which we can’t really see In the foreground, some adults observe this pedagogical moment with their backs to us In the background, a multitude of museum-goers traverse the gallery behind Every single