In September 2023 at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, Kehinde Wiley unveiled exclusively a series of portraits of African heads of state – 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
