Barkley L. Hendricks, major influence of Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, at Marian Goodman Gallery Paris

By The Editorial Team.

Barkley L. Hendricks, an influential artist

Highly-regarded in the United States and a major influence on leading figures of contemporary art, such as Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Rashid Johnson, whom he also portrayed, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017) had never been given the spotlight in a European exhibition before.

This long-standing injustice is finally being corrected by the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris. On February 6th, 2026, the institution opened a tribute show featuring an iconoclastic body of work. The exhibition weaves together painting, in particular his portraits of African American subjects, a field in which he was a pioneer and which brought him widespread recognition, compelling photographic works, including self-portraits influenced by the great classical painters, and more graphic pictorial pieces. The latter evoke pop art, such as a painting in the colours of the Pan-African flag. All is Portraiture is a striking discovery for the European eye.

An art pioneer

Born in Philadelphia in 1945, Hendricks moved through time with a rare consistency. That of a keen, precise eye, attentively focused on bodies, attitudes, clothing and social postures. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he painted friends, passers-by and strangers he encountered on the street. The artist was among the first to depict predominantly African American subjects.

Not out of overt activism, but out of simple fidelity to his own environment. “I paint the people around me,” he would repeat, steadfastly rejecting any form of political appropriation. Yet, portraying Black bodies with such majesty in a museum world that still largely made them invisible was already a radical, political act in itself.

His first European exhibition at Marian Goodman

The paintings presented at Marian Goodman Gallery, for instance, strike the viewer with their frontal quality and theatricality. In John Wayne (2015), a young Black man has a big smile on his face and wears a basketball jersey with open sandals. A monochrome background, an isolated subject, a rigorous composition… Hendricks draws on European masters, like Van Dyck, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, whom he discovered during his first trip to Europe. But he replaces aristocracy with the street, capes with tank tops, pomp with style.

Basketball, precisely, runs through the first space of the exhibition like a discreet guiding thread, bringing together paintings and photographs. A sport of childhood, an arena both assigned to and claimed by African American culture, it becomes a formal playground for exploration for Hendricks. In the 1970s, he distilled it into a series of near-abstract canvases – circles, squares, bright colours, suspended movements. Neither truly minimalist nor entirely figurative.

At Marian Goodman Gallery, the ensemble forms a fragmented portrait, reflecting its title. With Hendricks, all is portraiture, of course.

The camera, a “mechanical sketchbook”

First a photographer and a student of Walker Evans, Hendricks views the camera as a “mechanical sketchbook.” Photography feeds everything. The portraits, landscapes, self-portraits in which he stages himself before his own canvases, asserting his place as an artist rather than his intimacy, here again reference the great masters of classical painting. A particularly successful body of work.

“Barkley L. Hendricks. All is Portraiture”, exhibition on view until April 4th, 2026, at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, 3rd arrondissement.