Kehinde Wiley, The Three Graces, all images courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon

Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris is presenting Kehinde Wiley’s first solo show in France, entitled The World Stage: France, 1880-1960. Wiley’s portraits feature mostly black and brown men on elaborate, baroque backgrounds, their natural stances modified by Wiley to echo the Napoleonic, kingly gestures of traditional portraits like those of Anthony van Dyck.

Kehinde Wiley, Bonaparte in the Great Mosque of Cairo

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A view of the exhibit at Gavin Brown Gallery. All photos by L. Streeter, Art Observed.

On Saturday night, Rirkrit Tiravanija opened a new exhibition at Gavin Brown Enterprise in the West Village, completely redesigning the gallery space and re-purposing various rooms in order to host a dinner party of sorts. The show, entitled “Fear Eats the Soul” was named after the 1974 Fassbinder film “Ali – Fear Eats the Soul” which portrayed the story of two lovers together in Germany, who live in opposite worlds and fight to protect their love from racial tension and the scrutiny of others. Tiravanija himself comes from a widely diverse background; he was raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada and currently divides his time between New York, Berlin, and Bangkok. His acute global awareness certainly has an influence in this exhibition, which features a T-shirt printing factory producing shirts with equally politically-aware and nonsensical slogans in block print. The slogans feature a range of phrases, from solemn ones such as “BEHOLD YOUR FUTURE EXECUTIONERS” to silly word games and statements like “BRING ON THE LOBSTERS” which are hand-screened onto plain T-shirts.

A view of the silk-screening workshop.

More text and images after the jump…

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