By Ana Bikic and William M. Coulthard
© 2026 Miami Art Reviews | Art Review Miami. All Rights Reserved.
Contact: miamiartreviews@gmail.com

Image Credit / Rights: Installation photograph © Zachary Balber. Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles. Artwork © Kehinde Wiley. Kehinde Wiley, Morpheus, 2008. Oil on canvas. Presented by Jeffrey Deitch, Booth A2, Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. Featured in Art Review Miami / Miami Art Reviews.

Why Kehinde Wiley Is One of the Greatest Iconic Masters of Today: Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

© 2026 Miami Art Reviews | Art Review Miami
By Ana Bikic and William M. Coulthard
All Rights Reserved.  Contact: miamiartreviews@gmail.com 

I arrived at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 wondering whether I would find anything capable of truly surprising me anymore.

I did.

There was the extraordinary painting I still cannot forget: woodland creatures carrying an enormous American flag through tall grasses, with the wind seemingly moving through everything, the grass, the animals, the flag and the entire composition.

I still do not know who painted it.

Then there was perhaps my most fascinating discovery: an elderly Japanese master, approximately 93 years old, practicing the traditional art of woodblock printing and painting in the antique manner.

To me, he seemed almost like a living relic, not something belonging to the past, but a living master carrying an ancient tradition into the present.

I would have loved to interview him.

I wanted to know about his life, his technique, his history and what it meant to continue creating at that age.

Then I lost my photographic archive.

I lost the names, the galleries and the information that would have allowed me to find these artists again. I have searched for them since and have been unable to recover them.

And then there was Kehinde Wiley.

Wiley was different.

He was not one of my new discoveries.

He was my oasis.

I knew his paintings. I had admired his work for years, and he was already one of my favorite contemporary artists.

Among so many unknown names and so many works competing for attention, there was the unmistakable visual language of an artist I recognized immediately.

And once again, Wiley managed to astonish me.

The Ability to Do It Again

There are artists who create one extraordinary work.

There are artists who discover a successful formula and repeat it.

And then there are those rare artists who possess something else: the ability to wow you over and over again.

For me, this is one of the characteristics of a master.

Wiley possesses an extraordinary command of shape, form, color and composition. His paintings have a physical presence that cannot be communicated completely through a small photograph on a computer screen.

The figures, the elaborate patterns, the flowers, the clothing, the scale and the intensity of the color all become part of a visual language that is unmistakably his.

But recognition does not make the work ordinary.

You can know that you are looking at a Wiley and still be surprised by it.

That is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish.

At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, I encountered an enormous painting of a young Black man reclining among Wiley's characteristic abundance of decorative forms and flowers.

The young man's position, his clothing, his expression, the details of his belt and what he held around his hand stayed in my memory long after I left the fair.

That is what important images do.

They remain.

The Portrait Reimagined

Perhaps one of the greatest proofs of Wiley's ability is that he made me care about a form of art that had never particularly interested me: the portrait.

I have never been attracted to portraiture simply for the sake of portraiture.

Traditionally, a portrait is the image of a particular person—a face, a family member, a historical figure—something commissioned to preserve someone's likeness and perhaps eventually hung on a wall.

I could appreciate the technical skill involved, but I never saw the portrait merely as decoration.

Wiley changed that for me.

He takes something we believe we already understand and gives it another meaning.

His portraits are not simply representations of individuals. The person becomes part of something much larger: color, pattern, history, beauty, power, identity and an almost overwhelming visual presence.

There is something breathtaking about encountering one of his paintings in person.

It can capture every inch of your attention as you walk through a room.

Your eye stops.

For a moment, the surrounding works can almost fall into shadow.

Wiley commands the space.

And that, to me, is extraordinary.

It is one thing to invent something completely new and attract our curiosity because we have never seen it before.

It is another thing entirely to take something humanity has been producing for centuries—the portrait—something so familiar that many of us have stopped truly looking at it—and make us look again.

Wiley gives the portrait another life.

He takes a form associated with history, aristocracy, commemoration and traditional painting and transforms it without destroying its historical memory.

The past remains visible, but the people, the scale, the patterns, the colors and the cultural meaning belong unmistakably to the present.

That is where I find his originality.

 I Discovered the Sculptor

But another Wiley work surprised me even more.

It was an equestrian sculpture, a woman commanding a horse and holding a long pole.

I knew Wiley the painter.

At Art Basel, I encountered Wiley the sculptor.

The work was Rumors of War Study, Kéwé Lô, created between 2022 and 2025 and presented in bronze by Roberts Projects, Booth D22.

The rider is Kéwé Lô, founding director of Wiley's Black Rock Senegal artist residency. She holds a flagpole, and at its end Wiley placed a small figure representing his mother, Freddie Mae Wiley, modeled after the Statue of Liberty.

What initially appears to be a monument to power also becomes something personal: a monument containing ideas of freedom, women, family, memory and artistic inheritance.

Once again, Wiley takes imagery associated with monumentality, history and power and makes it unmistakably his own.

But what interested me first was much simpler.

It stopped me.

Before knowing all the explanations, before reading the title, before researching its history, I reacted to the object standing in front of me.

That matters enormously to me as an artist and as an art critic.

Art should be capable of existing before the explanation.

And credit also belongs to Roberts Projects for choosing to give this extraordinary work a prominent place in its Art Basel Miami Beach presentation. In a fair overflowing with images and competing for our attention, presenting an artist capable of stopping the viewer in motion is not an insignificant curatorial decision.

What Does It Mean to Be Iconic?

We use the word iconic so frequently today that perhaps we have forgotten what it should mean.

To me, iconic is not simply famous.

Iconic is unforgettable.

It is something that remains in your mind after you have walked away.

It is an image you can recognize among millions of other images without first reading the artist's name.

It has its own identity.

Its own visual language.

Its own place in time.

As an artist myself, I cannot imagine a greater achievement than leaving that kind of lasting impression: creating something capable of being recognized among millions because it could have come from no one else.

And today that is increasingly difficult.

We live surrounded by images.

Artists can see the work of other artists instantly, constantly and globally. Styles are repeated, borrowed, imitated and reproduced until sometimes what we encounter becomes a copy of a copy of a copy.

Enormous quantities of art are produced, exhibited, photographed and uploaded every day.

But how much of it do we actually remember?

Producing art is not the same as producing something lasting.

Wiley is different.

You do not need a label beside one of his paintings to know that you are standing before a Kehinde Wiley.

That is iconic.

And, for me, that is one of the characteristics of a master.

I Don't Have to Love the Artist to Recognize the Art

Today, Kehinde Wiley is surrounded by controversy.

Those questions belong to the history of the artist and deserve to be examined separately and seriously.

But they do not answer the question I am asking here:

What is the quality of the art?

We increasingly seem to have difficulty separating those things.

An artist can have political opinions I dislike. An artist can have a personality I dislike. An artist can become controversial. Society can embrace someone today and reject that same person tomorrow.

None of this automatically changes the composition of a painting.

It doesn't change the color.

It doesn't change the form.

It doesn't change the technique.

And it doesn't erase the experience I had when I stood before the work.

I have always believed that I don't have to love the artist to recognize the art.

Art history would become very small if we required every great artist to first satisfy our personal, political and moral approval before we were permitted to recognize artistic achievement.

A human being and the work that human being creates are connected, certainly.

But they are not identical.

When I stand before a painting, I must eventually confront the painting.

Who Are the Masters of Today?

I don't use the word master lightly.

Technical ability by itself is not enough.

Fame is not enough.

Price is not enough.

And an enormous gallery reputation is certainly not enough.

So who are the masters of today?

Perhaps they are the artists capable of producing something unforgettable, unique and lasting.

Not merely something fashionable today.

Something capable of remaining tomorrow.

Art has always carried knowledge. Images have carried history, religion, mythology, politics, beauty, tragedy, human experience and our understanding of ourselves across centuries.

Much of modern and contemporary art has attempted to escape the recognizable image, representation and even empirical reality itself. That rupture produced important art of its own.

But it did not make the image obsolete.

The human need to recognize, remember and communicate through images is much older than any artistic movement.

An image can carry knowledge.

An image can carry history.

An image can become memory.

Wiley understands that history.

His work does not reject what came before him. He takes the historical language of portraiture, the pose, monumentality, authority and visual importance traditionally given to kings, aristocrats and powerful historical figures, and brings it into another time and another cultural reality.

He makes something new without pretending that nothing existed before him.

That matters.

Perhaps the real test of the iconic is not whether something attracts attention today, but whether it remains recognizable tomorrow.

Not whether the market declares it important, but whether we remember it.

Not whether millions of images surround it, but whether somehow, among those millions, we can still recognize that one.

Kehinde Wiley has achieved that.

His work is unmistakably his.

It is contemporary without abandoning history.

It is beautiful without being empty.

It is technically formidable without technique becoming its only purpose.

And perhaps most importantly, he took something I personally had stopped caring very much about, the portrait, and made me stop and look again.

That is an extraordinary accomplishment.

I knew the painter.

At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, I discovered the sculptor.

And once again, I walked away remembering the work.

Wiley is unforgettable.

For me, that is what iconic means.

And that is why I consider Kehinde Wiley one of the masters of today.

By Ana Bikić and William Mark Coulthard
Miami Art Reviews | Art Review Miami

Contact: miamiartreviews@gmail.com 

We invite you to write a personal message. 

Where to Find Kehinde Wiley's Art

These are the galleries currently listed by the Kehinde Wiley Studio as contacts for his work. (Kehinde Wiley)

Roberts Projects
442 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90036
United States
Roberts Projects presented Rumors of War Study, Kéwé Lô at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. The gallery also has a dedicated image-rights and reproduction department, which is especially relevant to your request for the photograph. (Roberts Projects)

Sean Kelly Gallery
New York: 475 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
Los Angeles: 1357 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90028
Sean Kelly's own gallery history identifies Wiley as part of its roster. (Sean Kelly Gallery)

TEMPLON
Paris: 30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris, France
Paris: 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris, France
Brussels: Veydtstraat 13, 1060 Brussels, Belgium
New York: New York, NY 10001, USA — showroom by appointment
TEMPLON maintains a dedicated Wiley artist page and documents his work in major public collections. (TEMPLON)

Stephen Friedman Gallery
London: 5–6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ, United Kingdom
New York: 54 Franklin Street, New York, NY 10013, United States
Stephen Friedman is also listed by Wiley's official studio among his gallery contacts. (Kehinde Wiley)

Kehinde Wiley Studio — Selected Works
This is the artist's official online gallery and is an excellent place for readers to explore Wiley's paintings and other works directly.

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Why Kehinde Wiley Is One of the Greatest Iconic Masters of Today: Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

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© 2026 Miami Art Reviews | Art Review Miami
By Ana Bikic and William M. Coulthard
All Rights Reserved.  Contact: miamiartreviews@gmail.com