Kehinde Wiley’s return to London, after a three-year hiatus, is marked by his latest exhibition at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, which opens on October 3 and will be showing until November 9 .
The American-Nigerian artist, renowned for his vibrant depictions of African American and African Diasporic subjects, has made a career out of subverting traditional notions of power, dominance, and representation in art. This new exhibition, titled Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness, continues that mission, but with an unexpected twist: Wiley shifts from his typical large-scale works to an exploration of the miniature.
Wiley’s work has long drawn from classical European portraiture, a genre historically associated with dominance and privilege. But where European royalty and nobility once gazed down at viewers from grand canvases,
Wiley’s subjects—often anonymous young men and women of colour—demand similar attention in compositions that reclaim these symbols of status. In Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness, Wiley turns his eye toward the historically intimate and personal format of miniature portraits, which first gained prominence in European courts during the 16th century. Traditionally, these small paintings were used to commemorate personal milestones—births, marriages, deaths—and symbolised private expressions of love and remembrance.
Wiley’s approach to scale in this exhibition is at once unexpected and intellectually provocative. Historically, art has used size to convey power. From Michelangelo’s vast frescoes to the enormous canvases of Jackson Pollock, large artworks were intended to overwhelm, to dominate the viewer’s perspective. In contrast, Wiley has always been drawn to the monumental.
His portraits, with their imposing dimensions and lavish, botanical backdrops, exude grandeur. Yet in Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness, Wiley employs the inverse: the miniature becomes a vehicle for rethinking how power and significance are conveyed. Smallness, here, is not meekness but strength—an inversion of traditional associations between scale and status.
This departure from the monumental to the miniature serves to implode established hierarchies, both racial and gendered, within art history. The miniature portraits, intimate in scale yet imbued with a sense of majesty, encourage the viewer to challenge their assumptions about the relationship between size and importance. Wiley’s subjects, who hail from Nigeria, were selected on a single day at the University of Lagos. They appear in diverse garb—some in streetwear, others in traditional West African attire—but all are rendered with the meticulous attention to detail that has become the hallmark of Wiley’s practice.
The floral backdrops in these paintings echo those in Wiley’s larger works, reflecting his ongoing engagement with textiles and period styles, particularly French Rococo and Dutch wax prints. These backdrops, teeming with botanical patterns, entangle the figures in a visual complexity that both elevates and frames them within a long tradition of portraiture. The artist uses oversized oval and rectangular frames—formats popular in 18th-century portraiture—to direct the viewer’s gaze and establish a connection between his contemporary subjects and the aesthetic grandeur of Old Master paintings.
However, Wiley’s mission extends beyond formal experimentation. His work has always been a critique of exclusionary narratives in art history—narratives that have historically marginalised people of colour. With Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness, Wiley further cements his reputation as an artist whose work is not merely an aesthetic project but a political one.
He continues to challenge the Eurocentric canons of art history by inserting young, Black, and often overlooked subjects into the spaces traditionally reserved for white aristocracy. His subjects, their faces rendered with the same care and dignity once afforded to kings and queens, become stand-ins for a broader reclamation of identity.
Wiley’s work operates on multiple levels: it celebrates the individual beauty of his subjects, while simultaneously interrogating the structures of power that define who is seen and who is invisible. In Fragments from the Treasure House of Darkness, the artist’s focus on Nigerian subjects highlights the specificities of West African youth culture, while the meticulous miniatures invite viewers to consider the ways in which scale, representation, and status intersect in the history of art.
This exhibition, Wiley’s first solo show in London since his acclaimed The Prelude at the National Gallery, signals a new direction for the artist, but it is also a continuation of his long-standing project: reinterpreting the past to speak to the present. By shrinking the monumental, Wiley has found yet another way to ask profound questions about power, identity, and visibility. It is a conversation that, once again, he commands us all to engage with.
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