Untitled (West Side)

Working exclusively in portraiture, Kehinde Wiley is renowned for his luminous depictions of Black figures who he renders as monumental. The artist, who painted the official portrait of President Barack Obama, imagines his sitters in the guise of Old Master paintings, countering the genre’s long and exclusive history. In Untitled (West Side) (2004), a man is draped in a field of shimmering silver fleurs-de-lys, the decorative symbol associated with the French monarchy. Casting his models directly from the streets, Wiley sees his portraits less as direct likenesses than hopeful translations. ‘When I look back at these paintings,’ he has said, ‘they don’t give me a sense of where I was when I first met that guy. They don’t give me a sense of what I felt like when I first saw that original source material. They give me a sense of the world that I’m trying to create’ (K. Wiley interviewed by R. Holland et al., Bad at Sports, 15 January 2013).