CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/20/2018

Four Generations of 'Solidary & Solitary' work by artists of African descent

Drawn from the world renowned Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of modern and contemporary abstract African diasporan art, Solidary & Solitary opens this week at the Nasher Museum in Durham, North Carolina. “Places to Love For” (2013) is by the British-Ghanaian writer and painter Lyentte Yiadom-Boakye, whose paintings of imaginary characters, often ballet dancers, took the art world by storm last year during a one-person exhibition at the New Museum. In her New Yorker profile of the artist, Zadie Smith noted Yiadom-Boakye's ability to “create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative. The type of questions prompted by, say, Holbein (What kind of a man was Sir Thomas More?) or Gainsborough (What was the social status of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews?), or when considering a Lucian Freud (What is the relation between painter and model?), are all short-circuited here, replaced by an existential query not much heard in contemporary art: Who is this?”