Old Masters hip-hop for Kehinde Wiley

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- A young black artist who combines Renaissance art references with the garishness of hip-hop culture is getting his first solo museum exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which has recently acquired his five-painting take on the Sistine Chapel.

Kehinde Wiley, 27, has been out of art school only three years and he already is causing a stir in the art world. He is represented by major dealers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and his paintings are selling for up to $25,000 each. The work of few other artists got as much attention as Wiley's attracted at the recent Miami Beach Basel Fair in Florida, one of the nation's most prestigious contemporary art fairs.

The Brooklyn show is small, with only 18 canvases, but they are very big canvases. The largest are those from a suite of paintings titled "Passing/Posing," purchased by the museum for its permanent collection and displayed in a separate gallery. The ceiling panel measures 9 feet by 12 feet and four wall panels measure 5 feet by 7 1/2 feet each.

Completed last year, the suite's wall panels depict young black men in various poses in arched niches inspired by Old Master paintings (Rafael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci), while the overhead panel shows five young men, marvelously foreshortened, floating in break-dance positions up to an intensely blue heaven sown with lace doily clouds.

The subjects of these paintings are not wearing biblical or saintly garb but ghetto street wear -- baggy jeans worn with sports team jerseys or padded, hooded jackets, and baseball caps worn backward. The wall panel figures are posed against intricately patterned backgrounds, including a field of French fleur de lys and a filigreed gold screen decorated with red roses.

Close scrutiny of other paintings displayed in rococo gilded frames, some of them turned on point to make a diamond pattern on the wall, indicate that Wiley has been influenced by such disparate sources as Baroque architectural forms, Islamic wrought metal art, Celtic book illuminations, and protozoan life forms. He admits to being particularly influenced by the formalism of 18th century English portrait art.

"With the work I'm doing now, I'm interested in history as it relates to bling-bling (gaudy display)," Wiley said in an interview. "In places like Harlem, people ornament their bodies and love Gucci and Versace. I'm very much interested in certain types of French Rococo ornaments that end up as faux décor in shopping malls or in (architect) Michael Graves neo-classicism."

Wiley was reared in Los Angeles, enrolled in art programs there and visited area museum collections, feeling particularly drawn to the Huntington Library's 18th century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Joshua Reynolds. He got a degree at the San Francisco Art Institute and enrolled in a graduate program at the Yale University School of Art.

It was as artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in New York's Harlem in 2001 that he began experimenting with cross-over paintings combining Old Masters with the hip-hop street style that had originated in Harlem. Soon he was being invited to participate in group shows and was signed up by a leading dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, who has a keen nose for sniffing out "hot" artists.

Art commentators began writing about him, calling his style "faux real" and "bling-bling Baroque." His work was bought by celebrity collectors including Denzel Washington, Russell Simmons, Elton John and arts author Larry Warsh. At the moment he is working on a new series of paintings for his next show at his dealer's Manhattan gallery, Deitch Projects.

It will be entitled "Rumors of War" and will include large equestrian portraits that recall the style of Diego Velazquez. He insists that his sitters pose on live mounts. His models are mostly young men he meets on the streets of Harlem, invites to his studio, and hires at $100 an hour. The have some input in helping him pick subjects for his paintings from pictures of paintings and sculptures in art books.

"I've had some choose small figures in large paintings, not even the stars of the show," he said. "And then I've had some people who immediately want to see themselves as Christ in heaven."

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