Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Paints portraits of people who do not exist, quickly, and usually in a single day.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents and trained at Falmouth, the Royal Academy Schools and Central Saint Martins. The paintings are portraits of fictional people — figures assembled from drawings, scrapbooks and memory rather than from sitters — usually Black, usually against dark, indeterminate grounds, at ease and unexplained. She works in oil, quickly, generally completing a canvas in a day while the paint remains wet. She is also a writer, and the titles, which are oblique fragments of language, are part of the work rather than labels for it. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013 and had a Tate Britain survey in 2020.
The paintings are unique and are oil on canvas or linen, worked wet into wet in a single session, so the surface is thin and direct and retouching would be conspicuous. Scale varies and the titles are the primary means of identifying a specific work, since the sitters are invented and cannot be used to distinguish them. Drawings and works on paper exist. There is very little editioned material. Signature and date are on the reverse, and Corvi-Mora and Jack Shainman provenance is the usual reference.
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