Kehinde Wiley Instagram – A Maze of Power, featuring a series of portraits of African heads of state that I began working on in 2012. I designed these portraits to reflect the distinctive cultural elements of each State, thus highlighting the immense diversity of the African continent, and reveal the identity of each individual through the double prism of the artist and the model.
The compositions allude to military portraiture of Britain and France during the periods in which African colonization was rampant. The history of power in Western Europe and the history of painting are so closely tied. Using this vocabulary of power, a conversation opened up around the history of portraiture in Western Europe and then turned more specifically to each head of State and how they want to be represented. I wanted to place Blackness and Africa at the intersection of this question about the interrogation of power in picture making.
These paintings lay bare the contours of the ego, the diversity of possibilities in terms of taste and discernment, as well as the different communication strategies related to the construction of an image, both personal and public.
A MAZE OF POWER
@quaibranly Museum, Paris
On view through January 14, 2024 | Posted on 10/Oct/2023 12:41:38
