建立您的首份清單。
分享及管理拍品的方法。
"It's a rebuke of the mugshot, it's an ability to say, ‘I will be seen the way I choose to be seen." —Kehinde Wiley
An early example of his celebrated practice, Kehinde Wiley’s Untitled (Mugshot), completed the same year as his 2001 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, represents the artist’s earliest examinations of the language of portraiture. Joining a contemporary sitter and a setting taken from the ivory towers of art history, the present work raises the contemporary mugshot to the heights of heroic portraiture, bridging tradition and modernity and juxtaposing privilege and struggle.
Wiley ostensibly drew inspiration for this work from an NYPD mugshot he encountered on the street during his Studio Museum residency, which “got [him] thinking about portraiture, about the choices that one has to make in order to be in the portrait of this type.”1 Moved by the realization that such mugshots are often a defining form of portraiture of young Black men, and recognizing that grand portraits endow sitters with agency and power, Wiley has endeavored to subvert this artform, applying it to purposes grounded in contemporary America. Aiming to “replace the kings, princes, and prophets of old master paintings with contemporary African Americans, painted from life,” Wiley set out with works such like Untitled (Mugshot) as he embarked on a careerlong exploration of the formal conventions of portraiture.2
Detail of the present work Painting Portraiture
Untitled (Mugshot) is representative of Wiley’s longstanding interest in portraiture and in representations of Black people in contemporary visual media. Executed at the onset of his professional career, the present lot exemplifies the investigations of race, representation, and power that have undergirded Wiley’s work ever since. Considering Titian, Van Dyck, and Ingres as his aesthetic ancestors, Wiley intimately ties his practice to the established language of historical portraiture. A parallel and equally important artistic lineage is that of Charles White, Robert Colescott, and Barkley Hendricks, whose focus on representing Black people is central to the compositions and conversations surrounding Wiley’s work. Fusing these influences, Wiley renders young Black men in positions of power, representing his own personal culture and history within his artistic practice. By recontextualizing a found police photo, Untitled (Mugshot) is emblematic of Wiley’s early efforts to upend the rarified grandiosity of classical portraiture and uplift the overlooked in contemporary society.
While Wiley remains committed to uplifting everyday individuals, his work now attracts attention from pop stars, politicians, and the world’s leading arts institutions. Wiley was recently commissioned to create Rumors of War, a grand-scale equestrian sculpture, for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and was personally selected by President Barack Obama to paint his official portrait as 44th President of the United States, now part of the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. His contemporary achievements, however, would not be possible without the investigations of portraiture pioneered by works like Untitled (Mugshot).
1 “The Exquisite Dissonance of Kehinde Wiley”, All Things Considered, May 22, 2015, online
2 Farah Nayeri, “Kehinde Wiley on Painting the Powerless. And a President.”, The New York Times, November 27, 2017, online來源
私人收藏（直接購自藝術家本人）
紐約私人收藏
紐約，佳士得，2014年3月6日，拍品編號167
現藏者購自上述拍賣
當代紐約珍藏
60
《無題（大頭照）》
款識：Kehinde Wiley 2001 to Shanique with all my love! –K（畫背）
油彩 畫布 裱於藝術家畫框
30 x 30 英吋 (76.2 x 76.2 公分)
2001年作
估價
$50,000 - 70,000
成交價$69,300
New Now主管暨副專家
212 940 1279
New Now
紐約拍賣 2021年9月28日
208
此拍品已不再提供買賣。