Lynette Yiadom-Boakye


Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British painter and writer. She is best known for her portraits of fictitious subjects painted in muted colours. Her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the black figure.

Early life and Career

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London, UK where she currently lives and works. Her parents worked as nurses for the National Health Service after emigrating from Ghana. Yiadom-Boakye attended Central St Martins College of Art and Design, however did not enjoy her time there and so moved to Falmouth College of Art where she eventually graduated in 2000, and completed an MA degree at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003.
In 2010, her work was recognised by Okwui Enwezor who gave her an exhibition at Studio Museum in Harlem. In addition to her artwork, Yiadom-Boakye has taught at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University where she is a visiting tutor for their Master in Fine Arts programme. Her influence as an Artist was recognised in the 2019 Powerlist and she was subsequently listed in the Top 10 of the most influential people of African or African Caribbean heritage in the UK in 2020.

Work

Artworks

Yiadom-Boakye's work consists mostly of painted portraits of fictional black subjects. Her paintings are predominantly figurative with raw and muted colours. The characteristic dark palette of her work is known for creating a feeling of stillness that contributes to the timeless nature of her subjects. Her portraits of fictional individuals feature people reading, lounging and resting in traditional poses. She brings to the depiction of her subjects contemplative facial expressions and relaxed gestures, making their posture and mood relatable to many viewers. Commentators have attributed some of the acclaim of Yiadom-Boakye’s work to its relatability. The artist strives to keep her subjects from being associated with a particular decade or time. This results in choices like not painting shoes on her subjects as footwear often serves as a time stamp. These figures usually rest in front of ambiguous backgrounds, floating inside monochromatic dark hues. These cryptic but emotional backdrops remind commentators of old masters like Velasquez and Degas.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's style shifted slightly after the opening of her 2017 show "In Lieu of a Louder Love". The show featured a new, warmer colour scheme. Her subjects in this show included more vibrant details such as a checkered, linoleum-floor, a bold headwrap and bathing suit and a yellow, orange and green background.
Though each portrait generally only contains one person, they are typically presented in groups arranged like family portraits. With her expressive representations of the human figure, the artist examines the formal mechanisms of the medium of painting and reveals political and psychological dimensions in her works, which focus on fictional characters who exist beyond our world in a different time and in an unknown location. She paints figures that are intentionally removed from time and place, and has stated, “People ask me, ‘Who are they, where are they?’ What they should be asking is ‘What are they?’ ”

Writing

For an artist, she is unusual in describing herself as a writer as much as a painter—her short stories and prosy poems frequently appear in her catalogues.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's talks about her writing is to her as her painting and explains that "she writes the things she doesn't paint and paint all the things she doesn't write." Her paintings have artist poetic names.

Selected exhibitions

Painted in 2017, Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jacob Morland of Capplethwaite is displayed in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT.