Who is Kehinde Wiley?
The first black artist to paint the official portrait of the President of the United States, Kehinde Wiley is less well-known in the UK, but his current show The Prelude at the National Gallery is making waves.
X17766_web Production photo from on-location filming in Norway for Prelude, 2020 © Kehinde Wiley
Even though the National Gallery collection is a capsule of western art’s historic masterpieces, they still have a chip on their shoulder. The membership card declares: ‘Before Modern art, there was Art.’ Yet, they realised some time ago that Modern Art (or more precisely, Contemporary Art) has its merits.
It can provide a useful link between historical art and modern society, while offering artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical takes on both. So, two rooms in the centre of the gallery are dedicated to changing exhibitions of various contemporary artists, often working in dialogue with the permanent collection.
Kehinde Wiley’s show is one such exhibition. His works reference Romantic European art of the nineteenth century, of which the gallery has outstanding examples – from Friedrich to Turner. In his paintings, Wiley makes direct references to well-known works such as Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 by Casper David Friedrich, but replaces the white characters with black. This technique switches on our visual memory and makes apparent that the works are designed to question racial bias.
X11740 Kehinde Wiley, Prelude (Babacar Mané), 2021, Oil on linen, 387.2 × 305 cm
© Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Galerie Templon, Paris
Another artist occupied with the same theme is Kuanysh Bazargaliyev. Working in Kazakhstan, he creates pieces that are cognitively surprising – leaving most of the original work intact, and changing only small details such as the sitter’s eyes to give them an Asian appearance. Bazargaliyev’s series are called When all the People were Qazaqs – a play on both the ideas of grand past and peripheral present. Black and Asian cultures and people are largely ignored by History of Art, which often stands for History of Western Art – the National Gallery’s collection is proof of that.
Both Wiley’s and Bazargaliyev’s works reference the past but are firmly relevant to their immediate context. Image alteration apps and other modern technologies allow us to subject existing images to endless change. We are also relying heavily on images online – to stay in touch with friends, family, and the larger world.
The success of online platforms relies on our ability to read images – or rather the way our brain processes them – mostly without prejudice, accepting each image at its face value. We are used to reading images quickly, assuming we understood what is going on in seconds, relying on our existing memory of similar images. However, both Wiley and Bazargaliyev reveal the inherent problem that images create – by giving rise or support to prejudice and stereotypes.
Kuanysh Bazargaliyev, Alibek Durov, from the series When all the People where Qazaqs, 2013, acrylic on canvas.
Kehinde Wiley, through his paintings, questions the narratives of belonging. When presented with a wintery view we assume it to be occupied by white people – why? Because we saw paintings in museums and images on Instagram depicting such scenes. If anything, these lands should be associated with the North American Indian or so-called indigenous people of the Northern Europe and Siberia – the Buriats, Yakuts and others. Yes, these landscapes, just as their occupants, have become ‘white’. The artist drives the point further by filming in the winter season, when the landscape is in fact white.
Wiley asks us to explain to ourselves why it is curious to see people of different colour in an unexpected environment. Just as in the city streets – where ‘driving while black’ has become a term and a real issue – with black people six times more likely to be stopped while driving than white.
Reading the news, we may assume the issue is with the police and their practices, but in this exhibition (and in works by Wiley in the permanent collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Queen’s House of Royal Museums Greenwich) the artist puts his question to the museum-going public as well.
X11766.09 Still from Prelude, 2021 © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Galerie Templon, Paris
While the direct referencing of existing European works of art in Wiley’s paintings makes a stark and valid point, for me it reinforces some of what it tries to question – by relying on a language that created the prejudice. However, his video work is bringing into play various other contesting and contested issues. In The Prelude, which shows several black Londoners in majestic Norwegian winter landscapes, these include race, but also the environment and mental health.
In video, Wiley finds a perfect medium to transport the Romantic exploration of the ‘sublime’ to the modern day. The Prelude – a large scale six-channel video with evocative music and text – puts us in a position where we both watch and experience the sublime.
The sublime was European Romanticism’s calling card – a way of looking at and depicting natural beauty that provokes both awe and fear. In the 21st century, the sublime and nature have much wider interpretations, as Wiley’s video reveals.
X11766.03 Production photo from on-location filming in Norway for Prelude, 2020. © Kehinde Wiley
The first references that came to mind on entering the room were David Attenborough’s nature programmes, and my friends’ Instagram posts during lockdown. Attenborough’s films make us realise that nature is both glorious and fragile – in fact it is under constant threat and attack from us humans.
Lockdown snaps spoke of another constant battle between humanity and nature – viruses that reveal our own fragility, while also our need to escape into nature. From open-water swimming, to conquering mountain peaks, to crowds at a local park, the pandemic locked us in our homes, but also pushed us out of the city streets.
The pandemic moreover deepened something that has a long history – racism. Early on, it became apparent that black and South-Asian people were disproportionately affected by the virus – partly because of the conditions in which they live and attention they receive (or don’t) from the medical profession.
Black and South-Asian people were also more likely to distrust authority and, with it, the vaccination programme; the history of medicine shows mistreatment and abuse of black people. Wiley’s works strike at the subjects of power and privilege – taking black people from London and transporting them to Norway to make grandiose videos that challenge existing preconceptions of what these people can do and where they can be seen.
X11766.04 Still from Prelude, 2021 © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Galerie Templon, Paris
Wiley makes attractive and impressive visual works – whether paintings or video – to capture the viewer’s attention and then make statements and observations about our contemporary society, the environment, and the role of history. He relies on our obsession with images – our perpetual scrolling – by providing enticing visuals that remind us of something, but also don’t. He makes them big; he takes away the cosiness of the internet, and even of the original, much smaller, Romantic paintings sitting neatly in their frames for centuries. He questions our preconceptions about race today, but also questions where those preconceptions came from. He draws out the fragility of human resolve – asking his characters to hold a smile for an extended period – a smile which, under the effects of cold, wind and time, becomes a grimace.
We ask who is Kehinde Wiley, he wants us to ask: who are we?