Kehinde Wiley Puts a Modern Twist on Classic Art

Kehinde Wiley is a New York-based portrait painter born to a Nigerian father and an African-American mother in 1977. He is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of people with brown skin in heroic poses. He takes urban African-American males, from the well-known like Ice-T and Michael Jackson to those wholly unfamiliar (yet recognizable in their own way), and places them in the middle of historic European artistic settings/backgrounds/styles. His portraits are based on photographs of young men he sees on the street. Dressed in street clothes, his models were asked to assume poses from the paintings of Renaissance masters, such as Tiziano Vecellio and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The artist describes his approach as “interrogating the notion of the master painter, at once critical and complicit.” His work is found in many public collections throughout the world, including the Toledo Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Columbus Museum of Art; Kansas City Museum; Oak Park Public Library in Oak Park, Illinois; Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, New York; The Jewish Museum (New York) in New York, New York; High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, Arizona among others Some of his works:   For more info, visit his webpage Do you know amazing Nigerians doing great things at home and abroad? Let us know in the comments section below, let’s celebrate our heroes!  

 

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This article was first published on 8th June 2015

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