I came across this guy's works via Swizz Beats a few weeks ago...and I just want to share his amazing works with everyone. His name is Kehinde Wiley - enjoy!
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[size=14pt]Bio[/size]



Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, California in 1977. His father is Yoruba from Nigeria, and his mother is African-American. As a child, his mother supported his interest in art and enrolled him in after school art classes. At the age of 12, he spent a short time at an art school in Russia. Wiley did not grow up with his father, and at the age of 20 he traveled to Nigeria to explore his roots and meet him. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University, School of Art in 2001.

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists--including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others--Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world.

By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery. Wiley's larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men.

Initially, Wiley's portraits were based on photographs taken of young men found on the streets of Harlem. As his practice grew, his eye led him toward an international view, including models found in urban landscapes throughout the world--such as Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro, among others--accumulating to a vast body of work called, "The World Stage." The models, dressed in their everyday clothing--most of which are based on the notion of far-reaching Western ideals of style--are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings. This juxtaposition of the "old" inherited by the "new"--who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak--immediately provides a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope.

Without shying away from the complicated socio-political histories relevant to the world, Wiley's figurative paintings and sculptures "quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power." His heroic paintings evoke a modern style instilling a unique and contemporary manner, awakening complex issues that many would prefer remain mute.

An Economy of Grace, Wiley’s debut exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery, marked his first-ever series dedicated to female subjects. An award-winning documentary film about the process behind this exhibition was directed by Jeff Dupre and produced by Show of Force.

Kehinde Wiley received his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley’s work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Wiley will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2015.

[img]http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/images/02-07_full.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/images/02-06_full.jpg[/img]


[img]https://www.scad.edu/sites/default/files/Exhibitions/2011/Kehinde-Wiley_-Alexander-the-Great.jpg[/img]

[img]https://iconnico.files./2010/06/puma-x-kehinde-wiley-the-art-of-football-01.jpg[/img]

[img]http://bartable.bart.gov/files/images/events/Kehinde_MrsWaldorfresize11.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize/images/02-05_full.jpg[/img]

Wow. I'm simply blown away.


So life-like. This is real TALENT.

Nice

get ah h

This is really beautiful.

Kehinde Wiley.
Brilliant.

Dis is woww..m impressed