Overview
Kehinde Wiley’s vibrant and highly naturalistic paintings of contemporary African-American and African-Diasporic men and women subvert the hierarchies and conventions of classical portraiture.
Kehinde Wiley’s vibrant and highly naturalistic paintings of contemporary African-American and African-Diasporic men and women subvert the hierarchies and conventions of classical portraiture.
Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 in Los Angeles, USA. He lives and works in New York, USA; Dakar, Senegal and Lagos, Nigeria.
Wiley engages the visual rhetoric of the powerful, majestic and sublime in his representation of contemporary African-American and African-Diasporic men and women, who adopt heroic poses directly referencing European and American portraiture.
A solo exhibition by the artist ‘Fragments from the treasure house of darkness’ opened at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, England in October 2024. Marking a new direction in his practice, the artist created two multi-part paintings for this exhibition alongside a series of 60 paintings inspired by historic miniature portraits that first appeared in European royal courts in the sixteenth century. Wiley also had a solo presentation 'An Archaeology of Silence' on view at la Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale, which then travelled to the de Young Museum, San Francisco and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. An exhibition of new work by Wiley opened at The National Gallery, London in December 2021; the artist’s first collaboration with a major UK gallery. This follows his solo exhibitions at The Box, Plymouth in September 2020 and at William Morris Gallery, London in February 2020. Wiley had his first major survey exhibition in France in July 2020 at Centre d’art La Malmaison, Cannes.
Wiley was commissioned by Public Art Fund to create a large-scale site-specific artwork for the new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, New York, which was unveiled in December 2020. The artist’s monumental public sculpture, ‘Rumors of War’, was temporarily situated at Times Square, New York in September 2019 before being permanently installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia in December 2019. In 2018 Smithsonian Institution unveiled Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of Barack Obama for the Presidential Portrait Commission at National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. This painting currently tours the USA alongside Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama in ‘The Obama Portraits Tour’ between June 2021 until May 2022.
