Kehinde Wiley review – black souls sail between empowerment and exploitation

Stephen Friedman Gallery, LondonThe US artist picked as Obama’s official portraitist plots a romantic, maritime course for his show In Search of the MiraculousKehinde Wiley is the superstar American painter famed for placing anonymous, beautiful black men in kitsch pastiches of Old Master portraits of the ruling class. He is also that rare thing, an artist who has broken through to a mass audience. In addition to his street-cast “boys”, as he has called his models, he’s p