Kehinde Wiley unveils an exclusive series of portraits of African heads of state. A project exploring the staging of power, on which the artist has been working confidentially since 2012.
It was as a result of the election of Barack Obama in 2008 that Kehinde Wiley began to ponder the question of presidential leadership. In 2012, the American artist, whose work reinterprets representations of power and prestige in the history of portrait painting, imagined an original series dedicated to African heads of state. For the next ten years, he travelled the continent to meet them. With each of them, he has explored the history of aristocratic, royal and military portraiture in 17th - 18th and 19th-century Europe, to create a composition that illustrates each leader's singular view of what it means to be a contemporary African leader.