Author Description

Born in Los Angeles to a Yoruba father from Nigeria - absent from his youth and whom he would not find in Africa until adulthood - and an African-American mother, Kehinde Wiley holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute (1999) and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University (2001); he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His style is characterized by the desire to put the black man back at the heart of history. Thus, like a DJ who remixes and samples the great classics of music, Kehinde Wiley takes up great classics from the history of art which he recomposes with African-American characters imbued with hip-hop culture. Sensitive from his beginnings to the stakes of power and their transposition to the canons of art, he protested against the consequences of the absence of the black body in paintings' museum collections and the demotion of blacks as slaves or servants. He then embarked on the representation of young African-American men - initially from the Brooklyn and Harlem districts - by representing them in rewarding postures. Exhibition: Centre d' Art La Malmaison, Cannes, France (10.07.-01.11.2020)