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'The project is a provocation, on what is possible' - a look at Kehinde Wiley, 2021
This exhibition of new work, created in dialogue with the National Gallery, by the American artist Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) seeks to challenge the artistic conventions of the Western landscape tradition - mountainous, coastal, sublime, romantic and transcendental = through the media of painting and film.
In the process, Wiley links historical and contemporary questions concerning race, gender, identity and the natural world. Wiley's practice is based on reinterpreting and disrupting the Western artistic canon, making visible, as he describes it, those who exist on the periphery of nations, who shuttle back and forth between physical, gendered and racial realities'.
His work makes references to paintings created by artists from Europe and the United States by positioning contemporary Black sitters, from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds, in the place of the original historical figures. By doing so, he raises questions about power, privilege and representation.
Building on his recent exploration of Western marine art, Wiley's paintings, referring to Caspar David Friedrich and Winslow Homer, and six-channel film draw upon artistic concepts associated with European Romanticism, particularly the sublime and the figure of the wanderer, to investigate humankind's relationship with nature.
At the same time, they reassess the traditional associations in the Western imagination between awe-inspiring landscapes and seascapes, and race. The people that feature in Wiley's art were cast from the streets of Haiti, London's Soho, and Dakar, Senegal. These locations evoke historical and contemporary sea passages between North America, Europe and Africa that represent human narratives of loss, forced migration, exploitation and isolation, but also of hope, agency and self-realisation.
This exhibition in the midst of the National Gallery's collection, draws out the dynamic relationship between Wiley's work and the Gallery's historical landscapes and seascapes by artists such as Claude, Friedrich, Turner and Vernet.
'The relationship between man and nature ... polarities between
the mountainscape and the ocean ... this is my starting point'
Kehinde Wiley, 2021
In search of the miraculous (Zalcary Antoine and Jasmine Gracoult) 2021
Ship of Fools 2022
Ship of Fools 2 2022
Prelude, 2021
Prelude, 2021
In this film, Wiley explores the artistic and literary conventions associated with European and North American Romanticism, especially the connection between humankind and nature, through such tropes as the wanderer in the landscape and the voyage of self-discovery or self-determination.
It features Black Londoners that Wiley met and cast from the streets of Soho, near the National Gallery, after which they accompanied the artist on a trip to Norway to explore its fjords and glacial landscapes. By placing his protagonists in a Northern landscape of snow and ice - where they are surrounded, and occasionally subsumed, by whiteness - Wiley creates a powerful metaphor concerning race, identity, and childhood.
The film title refers to the autobiographical poem 'The Prelude' by the English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.
The soundtrack combines an original score by composer Niles Luther and excerpts from nineteenth-century poems and essays by Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, recited by the actor C.CH. Pounder.
Two short clips from the exhibition
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