Monday Morning ART: Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is hands down one of the dopest artist to be featured in our Monday Morning Art section, ever. "His heroic paintings evoke a modern style instilling a unique and contemporary manner, awakening complex issues that many would prefer to remain mute."

Artist: Kehinde Wiley

Education: 1999-BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California.
2001-MFA, Yale University, School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Artist Statment:

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within Art history's portait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portaitists, including: Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, to name a few. Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the subliminal messages in his representation of urban men found throughout the world.

By applying the visual vocabulary and convertion of glorification, history, wealth and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, the subject and stylistic references for his paintings are a juxtaposed inversion of each other forcing ambigunity and provocative perplex to prevade his imagery.

Wiley's larger than life figures disturb and interrupt trapes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as pertains to the view of black and brown young men.

Officer of the Hussars, 2007, Oil on canvas, 9 x 9 feet (274.3 x 274.3 cm)

Ibrahima Sacko (study 2), 2007, Oil wash on paper, 30 x 23 inches

Pape Seck (study), 2007, Oil wash on paper, 30 x 23 inches

Notorious B.I.G., 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet

Ice T, 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet

LL Cool J, 2005, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet

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