Kehinde Wiley Biography

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 among others Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic powerful majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world.
By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification history wealth and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric the subjects and stylistic references for his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery.
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.

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