Beheld

Amy Sherald’s portraits.

- Peter Schjeldahl

The subjects of Amy Sherald’s eight strong oil portraits at Hauser & Wirth impress with their looks, in both senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six of the pictures, the subjects stand singly against bright monochrome grounds. (The other two works are more complicated.) They are young or youngish, attractive, stylishly dressed, and likely well-to-do—presentable people, presented. All are African-American. Should this matter? It does in light of the artist’s drive to, in her words, seek “versions of myself in art history and in the world.” Sherald, who is forty-six and lives in New Jersey, revitalizes a long-languishing genre in painting by giving portraits worldly work to do and distinctive pleasures to impart. Her style is a simplified realism, worked from photographs that she stages and takes of individuals who interest her, an approach much like that of the late, belatedly celebrated painter Barkley Hendricks. Peculiar to Sherald is a consistent nuance, in her subjects’ expressions, which can take time to fully register— it’s so subtle. There is no palpable challenge. But there’s drama, starting with that of the show’s existence.

Three years ago, Sherald was plucked from low-profile but substantial status as an artist when Michelle Obama chose her to paint her official portrait. The Sherald’s “A single man in possession of a good fortune,” from 2019.result was unveiled, last year, along with the official portrait of Barack Obama, by Kehinde Wiley: the ex-President seated and leaning forward, as if in intimate conversation. Barack’s characteristic pose (I beg indulgence to use the couple’s first names, for convenience) rather undercut Wiley’s signature manner of investing contemporary subjects with neo-early-nineteenth-century, Napoleonic grandeur. (Wiley compensated by surrounding Barack with glorious flowers.) In Sherald’s painting, Michelle sits