Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, United Kingdom) currently lives and works in London. Her oil paintings focus on fictional figures that exist outside of specific times and places. She attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London; Falmouth College of Arts; and the Royal Academy Schools, London. Her work was recently included in the Sharjah Biennial (2015); the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); and the New Museum Triennale, New York (2012). In 2015 she will have a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and a two-person show at Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2013 Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Her work is in institutional collections including the Tate Collection, London; MoMA, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Blood Soaked South, The August, Leave A Brick Under The Maple, To Douse The Devil For A Ducat, All Other Findings, Just Above The Cloud, Six Birds in The Bush, and A Bird in The Hand, 2015
Oil painting on linen
Courtesy of the artist; Corvi-Mora, London; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new paintings featuring figures that are composed from a number of different sources including drawings, scrapbooks, and memory. She doesn’t think of them as portraits or even necessarily as people. They are people but somehow above and beyond people. They exist only in paint and they aren’t of anyone in particular. This is a kind of fiction for the artist. The narrative is not linear or fixed. Yiadom-Boakye likes to think of the paintings as forming a series as well as existing as individual works. Certain themes run through her body of work and have recurred over the course of many years. Over time, she has come to think of the different techniques and devices of painting (color, tone, composition, light) as themes in and of themselves. They are often the starting points – the things that carry and translate the meaning. That which is felt is very closely linked to that which is thought.