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; 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.
‘Kehinde Wiley: Ship of Fools’ opened at The Box, Plymouth in September 2020 to coincide with the launch of the new museum. In July 2020 Wiley had his first major survey exhibition in France at Centre d’art La Malmaison, Cannes, spanning over a decade of the artist’s career. In February 2020 Wiley’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 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.
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