Monday 2 March 2020

The Art of Kehinde Wiley

Naomi and Her Daughters, 2013.

Best known for his portrait of Barack Obama, the artist’s first solo London show is inspired by a tale of insanity and the women of Dalston

While growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, the Nigerian-American artist Kehinde Wiley, 42, discovered the work of the 19th-century British textile designer, writer and social reformer William Morris.
“He’s not so well known in the US,” he says. “But my mom was what you might call a junk dealer. [Her store] wasn’t really an antique store, but it sold second-hand furniture, oftentimes from old estates. So as a kid, I grew up seeing a lot of floral patterns, some Morris-inspired, some actual Morris pieces, among the stuff she was selling. And from very early in my life, there was this ornate sensibility inscribed.”
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Over the past decade he’s included literal representations of several familiar Morris designs – HoneysuckleIrisBlackthorn and Granada among them – in his portraits, though in Wiley’s hands the colours can be clashingly vibrant. “And it was only after working with that sort of decorative style that I began to take the DNA of Morris and build upon it to create hybrids of my own, these kind of all-over patterns that feel random and chaotic as opposed to that very rational order you see in traditional Morris prints.”
It’s appropriate, then, that his first solo show in a UK museum, a survey of portraits of women, will be at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, northeast London.


Read the full article here.

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