National Gallery, London
By inserting 21st-century black people into classic European paintings, Wiley questions the ownership of landscape, history and art – though Photoshop has its limits
The African American art star Kehinde Wiley is probably most famous for his official portrait of Barack Obama, tieless and relaxed yet deeply pensive in his chair. Emerald foliage floats around him, entwining his ankles and bursting into jewel-bright blossoms that symbolise his Kenyan and Hawaiian heritage. The 44th president is himself – photoreal to the last nuance – and yet inserted into this wildly decorative thicket. This is the classic Wiley fantasia.
He generally paints less powerful black people than Obama, however: men (and occasionally women) he meets on the streets of the US or Senegal, where he has studios, or in London, where he found models for this latest show. Wiley elevates these people, mainly slotting them into renowned masterpieces – Holbein’s The Ambassadors, say, or Ingres’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon, the horse now ridden by a New Yorker in Timberland boots. He plays beauty against politics, via art history – the overt objective both visual and political dissonance.
