Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley was born in 1977 in Los Angeles, USA. He lives and works in New York, USA; Beijing, China and Dakar, Senegal.

'The World Stage’, Wiley's vast and celebrated body of work, has focused on Brazil, China, Israel, Nigeria, Senegal and Sri Lanka to date, with exhibitions held in museums and galleries in Europe and the USA. 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.

 In February 2020 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Wiley’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK, opened at William Morris Gallery, London, featuring six new large-scale female portraits. A monumental public sculpture ‘Rumors of War’, the artist’s largest work to date, was unveiled in Times Square, New York in September 2019. It was 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, D.C.