Kehinde Wiley Exhibits Stunning Work At London's National Gallery

Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated his extraordinary work within art history by rendering portraits of contemporary Black communities in traditional settings of Old Master Paintings and European portraiture.

As he fills the Sunley room in London’s National Gallery with five oil paintings and a six-screen digital film, his message is clear. Raising the age-old question of power, identity, privilege, and most significantly the absence of Black and ethnic minority representation in European art and history. The small and intimate arrangement provides for an incredible viewing space of his oil canvases that have resided there since late last year; the room was filled with spectators curating their own significance to his work. In a dimly lit setting, and with spotlights above each painting intensifying the colours used, and contrast between each brushstroke, the detail in his work was hard to ignore.

Two of the largest paintings in the exhibition were re-worked projects of German Idealistic artist, Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), taking his 1818 portrait, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Kehinde Wiley substitutes the single European climber with a man from Dakar in Senegal. Although he doesn’t keep all aspects the same, changing the intensity of the colours and fine-tuning the lighting, we cannot know what Wiley or the Senegalese climber is thinking. While we all conjured our own meaning to this painting; is the white fog a metaphor for entrapment? Is he overlooking the endless possibilities to achieve? Or is Fredrich’s original message of the Napoleonic war transgressing into 21st-century conflict? There isn’t much to go on apart from deep delving and finding your own interpretation...

The second painting is a take on Casper David Friedrich’s 1818, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. Fredrich’s family was replaced by two men playing a clapping game, the same clapping game featured in the digital film, with one of the men looking directly at the spectator. The men fill the space of this painting ambiguously but keep to the message of Wiley’s work. Some subjects in his paintings wearing NIKE, Timberland, and holding Evian water bottles, highlighting the juxtaposition of the two worlds Wiley is bringing together.

As you move on into the second room, in his film Prelude, he casts a group of Londoners whom he met while on a trip to Soho and then travelling to the North of Norway to film just before the pandemic. The film was mostly improvised, which was notable in some parts, and shows the cast hiking, running, and sitting through the snow and striking Norwegian mountains. The most haunting and almost significant passage of the film was his direction to the cast; smile for as long as you could. Grins began to turn into sneers as the snow and cold began to bite, clearly becoming more and more uncomfortable for the cast to withstand. Tears welling in their eyes as they try to hold on to their smiles, but slowly becoming painful to tolerate and becoming agonising for us to watch. In another scene, two men stand stripped from the waist up, directly having their bodies against the white, cold snow.

It is clear that Kehinde Wiley is using the white snow and Norwegian cold to metaphor the entrapment of ‘whiteness’ and a detained space, something that has to be endured by Black and ethnic communities. Featuring readings for the 1836 essay Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wiley wants us to think about Black aspiration in white culture and being, growing, and living in a dying world.

Kehinde Wiley: The Prelude is at the National Gallery, London, until 18 April 2022.