Kehinde Wiley valuation
Puts young Black men into the poses of European state portraiture, against wallpaper that grows over them.
Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977 and studied at San Francisco Art Institute and Yale.
What a work by Kehinde Wiley is worth
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Bio
Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977 and studied at San Francisco Art Institute and Yale. He casts his sitters on the street, shows them Old Master portraits of monarchs, generals and saints, and paints them in the pose they choose — in their own clothes, at heroic scale, against a decorative ground drawn from textile and wallpaper design that curls forward over the figure. The World Stage series extended the method across Africa, Asia, Brazil and Israel. His official portrait of Barack Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018.
The paintings are unique, large and produced with studio assistance, which is stated rather than concealed and is consistent with the historical practice the work refers to. Demand has consistently outrun supply and institutional buying is strong. The decorative grounds are painted in flat, saturated passages that show retouching readily, and the canvases are frequently presented in elaborate specified frames that form part of the work. Bronze sculpture and stained glass exist in small editions, and there is a print output in screenprint and archival pigment.
At a glance
- Born
- 1977, Los Angeles
- Movement
- Contemporary art
The Obama portrait, and what circulates
Wiley's portrait of Barack Obama, unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington on 12 February 2018, made him one of the best-known painters in the world: Obama seated against a wall of leaves and flowers chosen for Chicago, Hawaii and Kenya. He and Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama, were the first African American artists commissioned for the official portraits of a president and first lady.
The painting belongs to the national collection, and the reproductions of it sold since, as posters and prints, are souvenirs rather than editions. Original works by Wiley come through his galleries with invoices and documentation, and the ornate frames many of his paintings come in belong with them. Since 2019 he has also run Black Rock Senegal, an artists' residency in Dakar.
The mugshot, Napoleon and Rumors of War
Wiley trained at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and at twenty travelled to Nigeria to meet his father. The method began during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where a discarded police mugshot of a young man led to works such as Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence) and Mugshot Study of 2006. In Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, of 2005, a young Black man in army fatigues and a bandanna takes the place of David's Napoleon, and Officer of the Hussars, of 2007, recasts Géricault's Charging Chasseur.
Rumors of War, a bronze equestrian statue some eight metres high modelled on the monument to the Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, was shown in Times Square in 2019 before going to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. He opened a studio in Beijing in 2006 where assistants work on some of the painting, the Seattle Art Museum gave him a retrospective in 2016, and his stained glass Go, of breakdancers against a sky after Tiepolo, has been installed in Penn Station in New York since 2021.
Best auction results
- Christian Martyr Tarcisius £660,400
- Painted 2008 · London · 7 March 2024
- Publicly reported
- More than double the high estimate of £300,000. At about seven by fifteen feet, the largest of his paintings sold at auction, and an auction record for the artist at the time.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
