Hand embellished pigment print on paper in artist's frame

'Tomb of Pope Alexander VII Study I' by Kehinde Wiley is a pigment print, 68.6 × 50.8 cm, produced in 2016. A young Black man wearing a lavender durag and purple T-shirt looks downward, his hands gathering a white jacket at his chest; a silver chain and ring catch the light against his skin. Behind him, a dense blue-and-white botanical pattern — recalling the ornamental vocabulary of Ming porcelain or Italian brocade — frames the figure in silhouetted foliage. The title locates the work within Wiley's ongoing dialogue with European funerary and ecclesiastical monuments, here transposing the compositional gravity of Baroque sculpture onto a contemporary Black subject. Trained at Yale and rooted in Los Angeles, Wiley consistently reframes the codes of Western art-historical portraiture to centre Black identity and presence on terms the tradition historically denied.