Kehinde Wiley

Morpheus Basketball

Regulation size, premium leather basketball featuring Kehinde Wiley's 2008 painting, "Morpheus." Includes cotton dust bag and heavy Lucite basketball stand with beveled edges and engraved, Kehinde Wiley signature.

29.5 x 29.5 inches

www.kehindewiley.com

This limited edition, 2023 leather basketball features Kehinde Wiley's 2008 painting Morpheus, reimagined from the Jean-Antoine Houdon 1777 marble sculpture of the same name. Featured in the 2008 exhibition "Down" at Deitch Projects, the series references and re-conceptualizes classic pictorial forms of heroism in the face of death. Morpheus features a model from Brooklyn, lain across a white sheet while florals from the background spring into life around his body. Unlike its 18th century counterpart, he addresses onlookers with direct eye contact and a seductive look of invitation, with the repeating floral background protruding into the foreground.

Kehinde Wiley (born February 28, 1977) is a portrait painter based in New York City. He is known for his realistic portraits of contemporary Black subjects that heavily reference paintings by the "Old Masters" Wiley received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and an MFA from Yale University in 2001. In 2017, he was commissioned to paint the portrait of President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Wiley's work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, and his paintings are included in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, LACMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Seattle Museum of Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, among others.