Posted on

Kehinde Wiley: “St. Andrew”

Kehinde Wiley’s “St. Andrew” (oil and enamel on canvas in an antiquated frame with gilded ornament) of 2006.

A young man in contemporary street-wear straddles the cross on which he will die. The unusual cross is associated with St. Andrew, a disciple of Christ who was executed for refusing to renounce his faith.

Kehinde Wiley, “St. Andrew” (2006, oil and enamel on canvas in antiquated frame with gilded ornaments; detail)

Kehinde Wiley poses his contemporary St. Andrew against rich brocade that comes to life as it winds over the figure.

Kehinde Wiley, “St. Andrew” (2006, oil and enamel on canvas in antiquated frame with gilded ornaments)

The subject is painted in a powerful and dramatic Baroque style in strong contrast to the flat background.

Born in Los Angeles in 1977, Kehinde Wiley now lives and works in New York. He earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale in 2001. He holds an honorary doctorate from the  Rhode Island School of Design.

Represented by New York gallerist Sean Kelly, 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, among others,

“Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, majestic, and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world.”

Kehinde Wiley, Sean Kelly

Kehinde Wiley’s “St. Andrew,” a museum purchase of 2014, is now in the collection of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art.

See:

Kehinde Wiley, Sean Kelly

Kehinde  Wiley, Chrysler Museum of Art

Posted on

Dan Colen

Dan Colen’s “TBT” (chewing gum and gum wrappers on canvas, in artist’s frame, 2008) sold at the Phillips Auction New York Contemporary Art Day sale of 17 May 2013 for $305,000.

Born in Leonia, New Jersey in 1979 and a 2001 BFA graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Dan Colen has long questioned the “editorial decisions artists have to make when creating a scene from scratch on canvas.”

Stepping away from paint as a medium in 2006, Colen started using chewing gum. In 2008 he wrote, “When I first started, the canvases were very sparse … It slowly developed into a more elaborate and involved process. I started adding a lot more gum to each canvas; I would put pieces down, pick them up again, move ’em around, stretch them out, mush ’em together, and mix flavors to create new colors”.

Dan Colen creates his work in a variety of media – painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation – from a variety of materials including gum, dirt, grass, tar, feathers, and street trash from the street.

He examines cultural mythologies and archetypes, the boundaries between “high” and “low” art, and the artist’s measure of “control” over the behavior of a given material.

Dan Colen’s recent “Purgatory” (2017) is a work of strong imagination and probing. On view at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Gallery, that now collaborates with Gagosian and Massimo De Carlo to represent Mr. Colen, stylistically it is as if by another artist entirely. Oil on canvas in deep reds and black, the painting draws the viewer frighteningly in along a diagonal through a tunnel of dark clouds back towards a receding glow.

Mr. Colen’s works are in a number of public and private collections including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery,  LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the Dakis Joannou Collection in Athens, Miami’s de la Cruz Collection, and Puerto Rico’s Jiménez-Colón Collection.

 

See:

Dan Colen, “TBT,” 2008, Phillips Contemporary Art Day, New York, 17 May 2013, Lot 125

Dan Colen, Gagosian

Dan Colen, Lévy Gorvy

“Lévy Gorvy to Represent Dan Colen in Collaboration with Gagosian, Massimo De Carlo,” Sarah Douglas, ArtNews, 31 May 2017