"For most of Kehinde Wiley's very successful career, he has created
large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African
American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The
theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on
well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth-
through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives
the authority of those historical sitters to his
twenty-first-century subjects."
--National Portrait Gallery
"My intention is to craft a world picture that isn't involved in
political correctives or visions of utopia. It's more of a
perpetual play with the language of desire and power."
--Kehinde Wiley
"Wiley inserts black males into a painting tradition that has
typically omitted them or relegated them to peripheral positions.
At the same time, he critiques contemporary portrayals of black
masculinity itself.... He systematically takes a 'pedestrian'
encounter with African-American men, elevates it to heroic scale,
and reveals--through subtle formal alterations--that postures of
power can sometimes be seen as just that, a pose."
--Art in America
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, imbuing his images with
ambiguity and provocative perplexity.
In "Black Light," his first monograph, Wiley's larger-than-life
figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often
blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes
of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and
physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young
men. The models are dressed in their everyday clothing, most of
which is based on far-reaching Western ideals of style, and are
asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures
representative of the history of their surroundings. This
juxtaposition of the "old" inherited by the "new"--who often have
no visual inheritance of which to speak--immediately provides a
discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope.
Without shying away from the socio-political histories relevant to
the subjects, Wiley's heroic images exhibit a unique modern style
that awakens complex issues which many would prefer remain mute.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
