The Dead Christ in the Tomb

The Dead Christ in the Tomb, Kehinde Wiley, 2008, oil on canvas, 3x12'
This piece is also on view for a few more weeks at the Kemper's Pattern ID exhibition in Kansas City. I've been looking at Wiley's work for quite awhile, and I believe it provides the beginning of a counter balance to the history of the painted portrait. Not to mention this guy is flipping us off. From his website: "...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, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world...larger than life figures 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." www.kehindewiley.com