[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features the works of Kehinde Wiley in Colorful Realm at Roberts Projects LA through April 8.
Visual artist Kehinde Wiley is a Los Angeles native, and is currently based in New York. Perhaps most famous for his Obama portrait, Kehinde Wiley’s style spotlights disparities of power and race. Vis a vis oil painting on canvas medium, Wiley represents underrepresented people of color in a historically white art form of oil painting and posing.
In Colorful Realm, Roberts Projects LA exhibits Wiley’s recent contemporary works. Inspired by Edo period Japanese nature paintings (c. 1600 – 1868), Colorful Realm juxtaposes the vastness of nature with nature’s ability to communicate power, performance and ritual.
Further contextualizing the Edo period from which Wiley draws experienced a rapid growth of urban culture. Artists moved from rural locales to inner-cities, which directly impacted the arts themselves. The mid-Edo period likewise wove Chinese and Western art and motifs throughout Japanese aesthetics. Wiley has specifically woven his portraiture with this lexicon and modernization in mind.
Wiley seeks (and achieves) to elicit non-Western perspectives in naturalist landscapes the West is typically accustomed to – with a departure from familiar flora of course. Colorful Realm leverages negative space to both highlight and speak to absence (of people and power).
There is both presence and paucity within each of the portraits; provocation without exploitation.
Artist:
Kehinde Wiley
Where:
Roberts Projects LA
442 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036
When:
January 21 – April 8, 2023
[…] Source […]