Lynette Yiadom Boakye

Biography

Born in 1977 in London, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a contemporary painter residing and working in London, the United Kingdom. She established an international reputation with her captivating imagery of imaginary subjects, most often black human figures, depicted isolated in front of a dark background.

Yiadom-Boakye follows her natural intuition. Her works are marked by a certain delicacy and characteristic brushstrokes. As a female artist of color, one tends to interpret or approach her works from a socio-political viewing point. However, although she is one of the main figures for the Renaissance of colored people in art, the starting point is, and always remains, the language of painting itself.

There is a certain purity residing in her oeuvre. The raw and muted colors flourish in her dark palette. Her figurative works achieve stillness, serenity, and timelessness. The depicted individuals are imaginary as they seem to be in a state of contemplation or introspection. Doing so, a universal character emerges, as she does not pin down her visual language to a particular time or era.

Career Facts

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is one of the most important British contemporary figurative painters. She has participated in numerous major art events, encompassing the Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art or the Sharjah Biennial.

She has exhibited at renowned institutions such as the Hause der Kunst in Munich, Germany; the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; the Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the United States of America; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the United States of America; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the United States of America; the Yale Center for British Art, the United Kingdom; or Tate Britain in London, the United Kingdom.

Her works feature in renowned private and public collections, encompassing the Tate Collection in London; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Pérez Art Museum in Miami; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Nasher Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the National Museum of African Art; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; or the Seattle Art Museum.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye achieved international recognition by winning the Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting award in 2006, the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize in 2012, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013, and won the 2018 Carnegie Prize at Carnegie International in Pittsburg. Her works have sold at auction for seven figures on the secondary market.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Books

For further reading, we highly recommend the following titles:

• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night. D.A.P./Tate: 2020.
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Prestel: 2014.

Artworks

Last Updated on May 3, 2023