Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

This volume gathers around 60 works by British artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, internationally celebrated for her paintings of timeless subjects in everyday moments of happiness, comradery and solitude. The publication includes texts by Yiadom-Boakye herself, writer and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun, and curator Lekha Hileman Waitoller.
Yiadom-Boakye’s lush oils on canvas or coarse linen portray fictitious characters rendered in loose brushwork and set against dramatic backgrounds. The figures are composites drawn from different sources including scrapbooks and drawings. Animals such as birds, foxes, owls and dogs make regular appearances. To look at a Yiadom-Boakye painting is an invitation to slow down and observe, to enter the imaginary visual tales she spins.
Born and raised in London by Ghanian parents, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and Falmouth College of Arts, and received her MA from the Royal Academy Schools in 2003. Her first solo exhibition was held at Jack Shainman Gallery in 2010. Since then, her work has been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2015), the Venice Biennale (2013), the New Museum in New York (2012), the Biennale de Lyon in France (2011), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2008) and many others. Her work has been collected by the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

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Taking inspiration from the techniques of historic European portraiture, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings could almost be from a much older era if it were not for the contemporary details of the Black subjects that populate her work. Though her subjects are people conjured in her imagination, Yiadom-Boakye imbues her portraits with a near-tangible spirit through her deliberate brush strokes and rich dark tones.

The result is paintings that seem to exist outside of time while still remaining grounded in reality. This lavishly illustrated volume of nearly 80 paintings and drawings—some of which have never been exhibited before—accompanies the first major survey of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, shown at Tate Britain. In addition to new fiction writing by the artist, this publication includes in-depth thematic essays on Yiadom-Boakye’s artistic development, reflecting the dual aspects of the artist’s career as both a painter and a writer and offering an intimate insight into her creative process.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her atmospheric oil paintings that depict imagined sitters in dark color palettes, executed with a contemporary sensibility while still rooted in an art historical practice. She attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize.

These imagined figures are almost always black, an attribute Yiadom-Boakye sees as both political and autobiographical, given her own West African heritage. Her elegant characters come to life through the artist’s bold brushwork, appearing both cavalier and nonchalant. This catalog accompanying her New Museum exhibition features an interview with the artist by Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni, new reflections on Yiadom-Boakye’s work by artist Chris Ofili, and art historians Elena Fillipovic and Robert Storr.