He also styled them, later, during the painting process. There is one work: In the original photograph, the subject is wearing a yellow and blue leotard. But in the painting, he edits the blue out and makes it all yellow. He also removes a necklace—the subject had one. He’s making choices that a stylist would make.
Is the Painter Barkley Hendricks the Ultimate Menswear Artist?
We explore his most prolific period of portraiture. Which, really, was the late Sixties through the late Seventies. This was a time he mostly focused on making portraits. After that, through the Eighties and the early Two Thousands, he really shifted more of his focus to landscape paintings, drawing, photography, and other things. We really wanted to show Hendricks at his most engaged with the genre of portrait painting. So we focused on the Seventies, and what all that means in terms of style, the Black Power movement, the post-Civil Rights era, and Black people redefining themselves. And one of the ways that people redefine themselves is through the things that they wear. Barkley Hendricks captured that redefinition as it was happening.
Ahead of the show’s opening, Sargent spoke to GQ about the under-appreciated facets of Barkley Hendricks and his work, the some of the overlaps between fashion and art, and realizing Hendricks worked like a stylist.
Antwaun Sargent: It really allows you to draw connections between the past and the present. You can think about costuming. You can think about jewelry design. You can think about old master painting techniques and the relationship and conversation that continues in the present moment. These are not just paintings that were painted centuries ago. They continue to inform us.
