Striking, life-sized portraits of Black Americans characterise the work of American painter Barkley L. Hendricks. Most prolific between the late 1960s and early 1980s, Hendricks's body of work was influential in its contribution to contemporary realist portraiture.
Read MoreBorn in 1945 in Philadelphia, Barkley L. Hendricks earned both a bachelor's and master's degree in Fine Art from Yale University. While pursuing his MFA he studied photography under Walker Evans. Photography soon became a key medium for the artist, as well as a preparatory medium for his paintings.
Hendricks depicted the world around him, capturing strangers on the street as well as turning the camera on himself, his friends, and his family. His work developed alongside the Black Power movement, which was gaining momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, his portraits echo the politics of the time, documenting and asserting the Black figure within contemporary painting and photography.
However, Hendricks resisted being defined by the political era in which he painted. He understood his work as political because of the culture of the period, but at the core, his focus was on documenting the figures in his life.
Barkley L. Hendricks's body of work is characterised by portraits of Black subjects. Depicted on monochrome backdrops that exaggerate the figure, his portraits focus on expressing a sense of individuality through clothing, hairstyle, and facial expression.
Hendricks solidified his style in his early paintings. Lady Mawma (1969), a depiction of the artist's cousin, centres the afro hairstyle of the female figure against a gilded arch. A self-portrait of the same year, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People—Bobby Seale), shows Hendricks with arms folded across a Superman T-shirt. His pose is strong and stark against a silver-grey background.
In the 1970s, Hendricks produced a series of paintings of young Black men. These works emphasised the clothing and poses of his subjects to capture their personality and style. In one of his most acclaimed portraits, What's Going On (1974) (titled after the eponymous Marvin Gaye song) the male figures are dressed head to toe in glistening white suits. Hands in pockets or at their sides, the figures of What's Going On are relaxed and exude a cool confidence.
Other notable works include Northern Lights (1976), in which Hendricks depicts his male subject in three poses, dressed in a fur-collared green coat and teal hat. The clothing is glitzy and disco-inspired, with platformed boots peeking out of black flared trousers.
In the 1980s, Barkley L. Hendricks moved away from portraiture, expanding his body of work into landscape painting. Works such as YS Falls #3 (2000) and My Back to the Bulldozer (2008) characterise this transition: quiet landscapes that reveal the sculptural qualities of the natural world. These paintings are circular and presented in gilded frames, recalling Lawdy Mama and Hendricks's life-long inspiration from the old masters.
Hendricks returned to portraits in the 2000s, notably painting Fela: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen (2002): a portrait of Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti that was exhibited in Black President: the Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at the New Museum, New York, in 2003.
Barkley L. Hendricks has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool—a retrospective of the artist's work that travelled from the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, to four other locations between 2008 and 2010; and Legacy of the Cool: A Tribute to Barkley L. Hendricks at Bakalar & Paine Galleries, Boston (2018).
Group exhibitions include Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, installed in the marble atrium of the New Orleans Museum of Art (2017), and We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s—1970s at Woodmere Art Museum (2015). Hendricks's work is included in a number of major museum collections, such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Jean Watt | Ocula | 2023
