Kehinde Wiley

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Kehinde Wiley (* 1977 in Los Angeles , California ) is an American painter.

Life

Kehinde Wiley is the son of a Yoruba Nigerian father and an African American mother. His father, who was studying in the USA on a scholarship, left the family before he was born, and Wiley only met him at the age of 20. As a child, Wiley participated in a free program that brought children from the socially disadvantaged neighborhoods into contact with art. In 1989, at the age of 12, he was invited to go to what was then the Soviet Union and paint murals in a workshop in Leningrad , learn the Russian language and get to know a world that was completely new to him. At that time, the desire arose to turn art into a profession. However, he did not see any possibility of living as an artist, instead planning a career as an art teacher.

Kehinde Wiley is a graduate of Los Angeles County High School for the Arts , graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BfA) and Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts . In the course of his training, he got to know the art world and realized that criticism has little to do with the work and a lot with the environment of the critic and the artist. This gave me the option to work as an artist myself.

He is best known for his large-scale paintings depicting people of African American origin in poses that are reminiscent of the classic works of the Old Masters . His work was also known as bling-bling baroque ( baroque ).

Pictures of him are sold for more than 25,000 US dollars , including celebrities like Elton John and Denzel Washington . His work has been shown in solo shows at the Brooklyn Museum , Deitch Projects and Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC . In mid-2006 he appeared in Artstar , the first improvised reality TV television series set on the New York art scene.

In 2010, the art collector Thomas Olbricht showed Wiley's painting Equestrian Portrait of Philip II , which Michael Jackson had commissioned from the artist, in his newly built exhibition house Me Collectors Room on Auguststrasse in Berlin .

Barack Obama selected Kehinde Wiley to paint his official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery . After the painting was unveiled in February 2018, alt-right activists launched a communication campaign against Wiley with reference to his Holofernes depictions, in which the triumphant perpetrator is black and the victim of the decapitation is white.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kehinde Wiley's Life and Legacy. Retrieved November 6, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Kehinde Wiley. Retrieved November 6, 2018 .
  3. ^ A b The Atlantic: Kehinde Wiley on Self Doubt and How He Made It As a Painter , November 4, 2018
  4. ↑ Sonaiya Kelley: Kehinde Wiley will paint Obama's official presidential portrait. In: Los Angeles Times . October 15, 2017, accessed October 19, 2017 .
  5. ↑ https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/02/12/pro-trump-trolls-are-coordinating-smear-campaign-against-obama-portrait-artist-kehinde-wiley/219343
personal data
SURNAME Wiley, kehinde
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH Los Angeles , California, USA