The British painter and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has an immense capacity to make the imagination of anyone contemplating her work fly. Her paintings, always starring black people, depict scenes of a forceful temporality. The artist’s ambiguity and ethereal strokes lead to identification and empathy. Her work is able to make you immerse yourself in each of her dark strokes.
Born in 1977 and the daughter of two Ghanaian nurses based in London, Yiadom-Boakye began combining painting with other works, until she won the Arts Foundation Award in 2006. It was then that he devoted himself completely to his artistic side, until he consecrated himself as one of the most important artists of her generation.
She has exhibited his fictional characters in art galleries around the world, with the Yale Center for British Art being one of the most recent examples. Her portraits, apparently depersonalized and fixed on a canvas alien to reality, lend themselves to all kinds of interpretations, a universal language that allows us to glimpse a timelessness of easy draught.
From 19 May 2020 to 31 August in Tata Britain in London and from 25 September 2020 until 31 January 2021, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will host an exhibition with 80 of the works of this painter. A complete tour of its artistic trajectory where it will be possible to appreciate and make kabbalas about its suggestive fictional characters.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, No Need of Speech, 2018
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Condor and the Mole, 2011
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s A Culmination, 2016
