A rare example by Kehinde Wiley to come to auction, After Memling's Portrait of Jacob Obrecht is one of only eight intimately-scaled wood panel portraits comprising the artist’s acclaimed Memling series. Executed in 2013, it was among the works unveiled at the Phoenix Art Museum that same year and has since been exhibited across the globe, notably at The National Gallery in London in 2021-22.
“The Memling series is startingly quiet and immediate…The painting’s size requires close inspection and engagement…Direct and uncompromising, these works represent Wiley’s most emphatic statement about race, culture and history to date.”
—Sara Cochran
Wiley’s meticulously painted portraits draw inspiration from the 15th century Flemish painter Hans Memling, who was among the first to paint portraits of the merchant class and not of royalty or clergy. Subverting the Northern Renaissance triptych structure, Wiley replaces the historic sitters with young men of color dressed in contemporary attire–here paying homage to Jacob Obrecht, the most famous musician of his day.
The series takes a key place within Wiley’s oeuvre, representing a distinct departure from the characteristically monumental scale of his paintings. It also importantly marks the first time Wiley included his sitters’ names within the paintings (here, subtly inscribed in the dark wood doors). Taking Memling’s formal structure as a point of departure, Wiley imparts his subjects with a sense of agency absent from his art historical forebears’ portraits: as evidenced in After Memling's Portrait of Jacob Obrecht, the young man returns the viewer’s gaze. “The viewer is eye to eye with the sitters. We are conscious of looking at individuals, not statistics,” Sara Cochran notes. “The Memling series takes the historical and makes it equally personal. The onus is on the viewers to extend their sense of history and share more broadly in the here and now.”
