Kehinde Wiley

b. 1977, United States

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.

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.

An exhibition of new work by Wiley will take place at National Gallery, London this winter; the artist’s first collaboration with a major UK gallery. This follows Wiley’s solo exhibitions at The Box, Plymouth in September 2020 and at William Morris Gallery, London in February 2020. Wiley had his first major survey exhibition in France in July 2020 at Centre d’art La Malmaison, Cannes.

Wiley was recently commissioned by Public Art Fund to create a large-scale site-specific artwork for the new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, New York. His illuminated stained-glass installation ‘Go’ was unveiled at the station in December 2020. The artist’s monumental public sculpture ‘Rumors of War’, was temporarily situated at Times Square, New York in September 2019, before being 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. This painting will tour the USA alongside Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama in ‘The Obama Portraits Tour’ between June 2021 until May 2022.

CV