Lynette Yiadom-Boakye valuation
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.
What a work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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.
Fly In League With The Night
Her survey at Tate Britain, Fly In League With The Night, opened in December 2020 and was cut short by lockdown, then toured to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf and Mudam in Luxembourg before returning to Tate Britain from November 2022 to February 2023. It was the first solo exhibition at Tate Britain by a Black British woman.
Because the sitters are invented, a painting is identified by its title, date and size, and an exhibition record such as this one, with the invoice from her galleries, is what confirms it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
