Clever merger of street style and postmodern (July 6th 2012) Clever merger of street style and postmodern (July 6th 2012)

Kehinde Wiley the 35 year old American portrait painter, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of contemporary men in heroic poses has been profiled by Ben Davis for ArtInfo as ‘How the Artist Painted Himself Into a Corner With His New Works’. Davis states “Wiley’s much-hyped… series of large oil-on-linen paintings in the same near-photorealist, mock-baroque style that made Wiley famous in the first place, though this time depicting African-American women (instead of men) who have been cast from the streets of the Bronx and Queens, each of them clad in frothy couture made for their sittings by fashion designer Riccardo Tisci, in poses inspired by works from the Louvre. …his big breakthrough during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he decided to cast young men off the street and paint them in the heroic terms of royal portraiture. The result was a clever merger between street style and postmodern painting. It’s a good formula. Possibly too good. It suggests intelligence (in the art-historical references) and social conscience (in the focus on the African-American community), but is also neither particularly hard to digest nor particularly confrontational. …On some level, Wiley is aware that he is a prisoner of his own success. He has tried to change things up …[but] did exactly the same thing…”

 

Inspired by Ben Davis ow.ly/bWbwm image source Facebook ow.ly/bWbuj