February 21, 2013–June 23, 2013
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The University of Utah
Marcia and John Price Museum Building
410 Campus Center Drive
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
www.umfa.utah.edu/salt
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is pleased to present never-before exhibited oil paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in its seventh installment of the Museum’s series of exhibitions introducing new and innovative art from around the world. salt 7: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is the British artist’s first solo exhibition in the western United States.
Yiadom-Boakye’s style shows her deep understanding of, and engagement with, the Western history of painting. In a sense, her work is a pastiche of earlier artistic styles, and her paintings bring to mind the work of Goya, Manet, Degas, and Cézanne. However, her new subject matter—almost always the black figure—alters the mood and connotations of early modernist techniques and highlights modernism’s flawed perceptions of race. She recognizes painting’s ability to investigate subject- and object-hood, visibility and invisibility, and she uses art history’s visual language to subvert traditional signifiers of power.
Though Yiadom-Boakye draws attention to historical inequities of representation, she does so without employing overly defiant, revisionist, or celebratory imagery. Her paintings consider the normalcy of blackness and investigate the intricacies of the human condition. Her figures engage in routine activities, yet comprised of unblended brushstrokes and slightly disjointed parts, they appear unbalanced. Their murky, undefined backgrounds set a peculiar atmosphere that is further complicated by enigmatic, often provocative, titles. Beneath the paintings’ luscious surfaces and behind their smiling faces runs a violent current, an emotional distress that is as mysterious as it is uncomfortably familiar.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977 in London to Ghanian parents. She studied at Central St Martins School of Art and Design and Falmouth College of Art before she completed her graduate work at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003. In 2012 she had solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Chisenhale Gallery in London and was included in group exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the Miami Art Museum, the Menil Collection in Houston, and other institutions. Her work is in many public collections including the Tate Modern, the British Council, the Arts Council Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Miami Art Museum in Florida; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the CCA Andratx Collection in Mallorca, Spain; and the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina. She was recently awarded the prestigious 2012 Future Generation Art Prize by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.
The seventh salt exhibition will be on view from February 21 through June 23, 2013, in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building at the University of Utah. The exhibition will be located in the salt gallery on the UMFA’s second floor, adjacent to the Museum’s permanent collection of modern and contemporary art. salt aims to reflect the international impact of contemporary art today, forging local connections to the global, and bringing new and diverse artwork to the city that shares the program’s name. salt 7: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is curated by Whitney Tassie, UMFA curator of modern and contemporary art, and generously sponsored by Nancy and Dave Gill with support from Noel Kirnon.
Press contact:
Mindy Wilson, 801 581 7328 / [email protected]
Museum hours:
Tuesday–Friday 10–5pm; Wednesdays 10–8pm; Weekends 11–5pm; closed Mondays and holidays.
Programming:
A Conversation with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Thursday, February 21, at 7pm
UMFA Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Auditorium
