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An American original, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) established himself as one of the foremost painters of Black life. His luminous portraits capture the hypnotic energy and effervescent attitude of a people whose style and flair has been often imitated but never duplicated. Coming of age during the Black Power movement, Hendricks recognized the resounding absence of Blackness from the canon of Western art and sought to redress it by creating a pantheon of life-size portraits of friends, relatives, and strangers he met on the street.
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Using the techniques of Old Masters, Hendricks would go on to create portraits with more bounce to the ounce than the average masterpiece. Never one to fear going against the grain, Hendricks crafted his own lane, working in figurative art at a time when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art dominated the contemporary art world. A year before his death Hendricks told the Brooklyn Rail, “I didn’t care what was being done by other artists or what was happening around me. I was dealing with what I wanted to do. Period.”
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While setting the art world ablaze with his paintings, Hendricks also worked as a photographer, strapping the “mechanical sketchbook” to his neck before leaving home and using the camera to record sources of inspiration. The new book Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (published by Skira), offers an extraordinary look into the artist’s little known photography practice, providing a vital look at the ways in which picture making informed his work.
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