Kehinde Wiley

Born in 1977 in Los Angeles, Kehinde Wiley lives and works in New York. Known for his extremely realist paintings of Afro people, the American portraitist frequently makes references to old masters’ artworks. Exploring questions of racial and sexual identity, his artform creates a dialogue and a clash between art history and street culture. Wiley’s work reinterprets the vocabulary of power and prestige, as both a political criticism and an explicit fascination for luxury and the splendor of Western symbols of the male domination. Afro-American artists like Wiley enabled the integration of ignored communities into the genre of history painting.

In 2017, Wiley was commissioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to create an official portrait of the ancient president Barack Obama, as the gallery possesses portraits of all the previous presidents of the United States. The Columbus Museum of Art – which exhibited his paintings in 2007 – stated that “Wiley has been recently acclaimed for his heroic portraits dealing with the image and status of young Afro-American men in contemporary culture”.

Kehinde Wiley’s works are exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum in NY; the National Gallery in London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Château de Malmaison, France.