Raising New Heights
A new view on Contemporary Art
Kehinde Wiley
A contemporary African-American painter known for his distinctive portraits. His subjects are often young black men and women, rendered in a Photo Realist style against densely pattered backgrounds. Born on February 28, 1977 in Los Angeles, CA, he received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2001.Today, Wiley’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Denver Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
A fusion of styles is covered in his work which includes Western African textile, French Rococo, Islamic architecture, and Urban hip hop. He depicts the representation of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the views of black and brown men. Without shying from the sociopolitical histories relevant to the world, Wiley’s figurative paintings “explores the perception of blackness and put young black youth within a field of power” awakening complex issues that would prefer to remain mute.
Model Selection
Initially, Wiley’s portraits were based on photographs of young men found in Harlem but that expended to include models found in urban landscapes throughout the world-such as Rio de Janeiro, Dakar, Senegal accumulating a vast body of work called “The World Stage”. The models are dressed in every day clothing- most of which are based on the far-reaching Western ideals of style. A camera crew is typically present along with examples of his work and usually an attractive woman is nearby. When street casting, Wiley looks for alpha male behavior and sensibility.
Inspiration: Classical European paintings of noblemen, royalty and aristocrats. Wiley sometimes use inspiration from High Renaissance or the late French Rococo or the 19th century books that he bring out when he paints. Most of the backgrounds he ends up using are sheer decorative devices. Things that come from things like wallpaper or the architectural façade ornamentation of a building, and in a way it robs the painting of any sense of place or location, and it’s located strictly in an area of the decorative.
A New Republic
A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture.
OKC MOA exhibit video: https://youtu.be/dpUGGeHPJqw
Lamentation
In this series Kehinde use religious references to produce the paintings. The exhibition featured a series of ten monumental works in the form of stained glass windows and paintings.
The mourning of black death is not apparent in the U.S.. In this painting, Kehinde depicted Jesus as a Black man hoping that it would create more empathy for those whose lives have been taken from them. This is his attempt to reveal Christians deficiency in their willingness to mourn the suffering of Black men and women.
In Riley’s depiction of Jesus, his face and body are radiant. The body no longer resembles are putrefying corpse and all the wounds are gone. Some art critics have recognized a homoeroticism in Kehinde Wiley’s paintings linking them to his sexuality.
Gender is also something that Kehinde Wiley plays with in this series where male pose as female figures and vice versa. When the reference painting include a nude female, the male figures are often fully clothed, but they mimic the same pose and mannerism. This creates a dialogue when discussing our willingness to display the naked female body and refrain from showing a males’.
Artist website: https://kehindewiley.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kehindewiley/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kehindewileyart
