The series of portraits of African heads of state unveiled by Kehinde Wiley at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, an exploratory project around the representation of power on which the painter has been working confidentially since 2012.
"A Maze of Power superimposes several perspectives—that of European painting, that of the sitters, that of the painter and that of the viewer—in order to decipher absent speech and offer a commentary amid the noise and fury of African presidencies, imagined or otherwise […] The painter represents the res publica, the state and its figureheads; heads and former heads of state. The portrait gives them an incarnation." — Mamadou Diouf
Kehinde Wiley, whose work reinterprets pictorial representations of power and prestige through the tradition of portrait painting, began to question the meaning of presidential leadership after the election of Barack Obama. In 2012, he imagined an unprecedented 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. In September 2023, the series A Maze of Power was exhibited for the first time at musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac.
Born in 1977 in Los Angeles, Kehinde Wiley lives and works in New York. Examining issues of racial and sexual identity, his works create collisions where art history and street culture come face to face. The artist makes eroticised heroes of the invisible, those traditionally banished from representations of power. His work reinterprets the vocabulary of power and prestige, part politically-charged critique, part an avowed fascination with the luxury and bombast of Western symbols of male domination.
