Kehinde Wiley's 'Portrait of Mojisola Kareem-Elufowoju' at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Kehinde Wiley's 'Portrait of Mojisola Elufowoju' will be on view at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery from Friday 8 March. 

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. He 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.

'Portrait of Mojisola Elufowoju' is part of a series that offers a visual response to American novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s acclaimed feminist text, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', 1892. Wiley explains, "'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a work of literary fiction that explores the contours of femininity and insanity. [These works seek] to use the language of the decorative to reconcile blackness, gender, and a beautiful and terrible past."