The painting School of Beauty, School of Culture is among the exhibits in a major new London retrospective of the US artist Kerry James Marshall. But there is more to the salon scene than first meets the eye.

At nine feet tall and 13 feet wide, School of Beauty, School of Culture doesn't just tower over its viewers; it invites them in. "If you want to make a painting that many people can look at together and that can compete with paintings in big museums, then it's got to have scale," explains art historian Mark Godfrey, curator of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy, London. "The painting has its own wall" in the exhibition, he tells the BBC, "and can be seen from a distance of about 60 metres away."

The US figurative painter is among the most acclaimed living artists in the world, and in 2018 set a new record when his Past Times sold at auction for $21.1 million – a groundbreaking amount for a work by a living African-American artist at the time. The Royal Academy show, which opens today, is the largest survey of his art ever shown in Europe. "Staggering, triumphant", "ingenious" and "astonishing" are just some of the glowing epithets recently used in reviews of the exhibition. "Prepare to be bewitched," says another. And nothing in it is more bewitching than School of Beauty, School of Culture.

Completed in 2012, the painting presents an everyday scene, yet like the other artworks displayed in The Histories, there is more to it than initially meets the eye. The scenario is layered with multiple coded references from history, culture and art history, from Disney to Holbein.

The lively scene in a bustling hair salon buzzes with activity. In one corner, a woman flails her arms as she chats with her hairdresser. In another, a group of men and women congregate. Slightly off-centre, a poised woman, dressed in a yellow-and-black shirt and striped trousers, stares directly at us. Her knees are bent, one arm leans on the back of her head, the other on her waist. She poses as two children play at her feet. It's a magnificent scene, conveying all the hubbub of a local business that doubles as a community hub.

Like many great painters before him, Marshall transforms everyday life into remarkable works of art. But unlike most previous works known for their portrayals of contemporary scenes – from Édouard Manet's scenes of Parisian cafés to Georges Seurat's large-scale depiction of a Sunday afternoon in Paris – all of the figures in School of Beauty, School of Culture are black.

"I'm more interested in the specificity of beauty shops and barbershops for black subjects because that's where I am and who I am," the artist tells the BBC at an advance showing of the exhibition. "What is the place for? What does the place mean? What happens there? That's largely what the picture is about."

Around the corner from his studio in Chicago, where Marshall has lived for almost four decades, there is a beauty school "where they teach classes in cosmetology, manicuring, all of that stuff", he notes, pointing out that such salons are both a part of ordinary life and a place of healing magic. "People go in and they come out transformed: they come out polished, they come out made up, they come out done."

Despite its almost 26-year gap, School of Beauty, School of Culture is in direct conversation with an earlier work by Marshall, De Style (1993), which depicts a black barbershop. Named with reference to the Dutch art movement De........

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