Los Angeles native and New York-based
visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's
portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of
portraitists--including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and
others--Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful,
majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found
throughout the world.
By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery.
Without shying away from the complicated
socio-political histories relevant to the world, Wiley's figurative paintings
and sculptures "quote historical sources and position young black men
within the field of power." His heroic paintings evoke a modern style
instilling a unique and contemporary manner, awakening complex issues that many
would prefer remain mute.
Kehinde Wiley received his MFA from Yale
University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the
Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley’s work has been the subject of exhibitions
worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver
Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus
Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish
Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Wiley will be the subject
of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2015.
