2
2
2
Kehinde Wiley is a very talented artist whose site at Artnet's Artists Works Catalogues is still "Under Development." The following picture of him is at his AWC home site:
The Artist, Kehinde Wiley
To view the above picture at its source, click here. Below that picture of Wiley, there is an excellent description of his art, and I quote the description's first two paragraphs:
"Kehinde
Wiley is a New York based painter from Los Angeles who has
situated himself firmly within art history's tradition of portrait painting.
Wiley, as the contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists including
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others, appropriates the signs and
visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, opulent, majestic, and sublime in his
representations of young, urban, black men.
The subjects and stylistic references for his paintings
are juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative
perplexity to pervade his imagery. By applying the visual vocabulary and
conventions of glorification, history, wealth, power, and prestige to subject
matter drawn from the urban fabric in which he is embedded, Wiley presents his
young men as both heroic and pathetic, aestheticized and reified, autonomous
and manipulated. Ultimately, Wiley's practice disturbs and interrupts tropes of
portrait painting to locate, in his words, 'class struggle at the level of sign'."
Enjoy.
St. Francis of Paola (2003)
Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005)
Portrait of Andries Stilte (2005)
St. Francis of Assisi (2005)
Commodore Augustus Keppel (2005)
Investiture of Bishop Herald as the Duke of Francona (2005)
Elkannah Watson (2005)
-
* Information and images provided courtesy of the Kehinde Wiley Studio and Artnet's Artist Works Catalogues.
