A New Brand Of Portraiture

Known for his larger-than-life, hyperrealistic, and richly detailed portraits that substitute depictions of aristocratic Europeans bearing symbols of power and status in paintings by artists between the Renaissance and 1800, with good-looking African American men and women in modern-day clothes – T-shirts, sweatpants, jeans, sneakers, and bandanas – striking confident, heroic poses, Kehinde Wiley has been subverting the power relations embedded in certain art traditions. The Los Angeles-born, Yale-educated portraitist confronts and critiques historical traditions that do not acknowledge the black cultural experience, thereby bringing Old Master paintings by the likes of Velazquez, Rubens, Titian, Van Dyck or Holbein face to face with contemporary popular culture.

Portraying dark-skinned people from all walks of life, Kehinde – the first African-American artist to paint an official portrait of an American president (Barack Obama) for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery – has painted everyone from Michael Jackson and rapper LL Cool J to the ordinary man in the street and Tahiti’s Mahu third-gender community through the prism of Paul Gauguin’s masterpieces, which he presented in a 2019 solo show at Galerie Templon in Paris.

Harnessing the power of art to shift perception and to make visible history’s forgotten figures, Kehinde began his career by exploring African-American notions of masculinity and how black men were perceived in public and private spaces before adding women wearing flowing gowns and headpieces in empowering stances to his repertoire in 2012. In his unique way, he has been correcting the lack of non-white faces in Western museums, where people of colour have been typically excluded from representations of power.

“I KNOW THAT MY WORK HAS HAD AN EFFECT ON PEOPLE’S LIVES; I HEAR IT.”

– KEHINDE WILEY