Wiley hopes the facing portraits will spark a dialogue. “The Blue Boy” will be relocated opposite the work, at the other end of the gallery, for the run of the exhibition.
3 - will hang where “The Blue Boy” now does, at the head of the Huntington’s Thornton Portrait Gallery. Wiley’s painting - which will be on view at the Huntington from Oct. And it turns out those same bodies that have no political, social, demographic relationship to the country that you come from are all indicted within this language of Blackness, this language of skin.” I wake up, there’s a global pandemic, what do you do, who do you paint? You paint Black and brown people surrounding you. “And also the way that a society wants to figure a young man coming into age, coming into manhood.”Īt the same time, he said, the new work “responds to global Blackness, not just a localized California sense of where we are. “It’s aesthetically and traditionally tied to a very mannered and known narrative surrounding power, dignity and beauty,” Wiley said. The model, in a similar pose as Gainsborough’s, is from Dakar, Senegal, where Wiley has a studio and painted much of the work during the COVID lockdown in 2020. It’s titled “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman,” which was Gainsborough’s original title of “The Blue Boy.” It nods to the technique and style of British Grand Manner portraiture but within an entirely different context. Wiley’s new work for the Huntington, which will be part of the museum’s permanent collection, is both historically referential and particularly immediate.
‘The Blue Boy’ represents, for me, an ability to address the different standards with regards to who gets recognized, who gets praised.” But there was also a disconnect - the life I was having in South-Central Los Angeles and then these incredibly mannered and organized gardens and these portraits that hung on the walls. “Looking at those paintings gave me a sense of joy and wonder.
And then slowly it became something I fell in love with,” Wiley said. “As a kid, I’d go to the Huntington and look at art because I was forced to.
0 kommentar(er)
