Kehinde Wiley

The World Stage : India Sri Lanka, 2012

Text: Gayatri Sinha. Interview by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)
Pages: 48
English and Hindi
Format: Hardcover
Size: 8.75 x 11.25 x 0.3 inches
Publisher: D.A.P

€40.00

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About the work

The World Stage : India Sri Lanka, 2012

Brooklyn-based painter Kehinde Wiley's acclaimed World Stage series inserts into the language of old master portraiture the very ethnicities and ethnic iconography that Western art has most excluded from it, or that Western art has portrayed solely in colonial terms.

Among the countries and continents the American artist currently the subject of a major exhibition traveling to Brooklyn, Fort Worth, Toledo, Seattle and Richmond has previously depicted in this ambitious epic are Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Africa, China, France, and Israel. As technically impressive as they are conceptually complex, Wiley's portraits feature young black men in classic heroic poses, destabilizing canonical ideas of white masculinity and power.

By Kehinde Wiley Text by Gayatri Sinha. Interview by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) This volume includes a selection of new World Stage portraits, focusing on India (specifically the cities of New Delhi and Mumbai) and Sri Lanka. Text is in English and Hindi.

About artist

Kehinde Wiley

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among others, Wiley, engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world.

By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, the subjects and stylistic references for his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery.

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

Initially, Wiley’s portraits were based on photographs taken of young men found on the streets of Harlem. As his practice grew, his eye led him toward an international view, including models found in urban landscapes throughout the world – such as Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro, among others – accumulating to a vast body of work called, “The World Stage.”

The models, dressed in their everyday clothing most of which are based on the notion of far-reaching Western ideals of style, are asked to...

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