Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night

Beginning in October, K20 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen will present Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night, the first comprehensive exhibition of the painter’s work in Germany. This show exemplifies the power that painting can still have today.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977 in London) is a painter. She paints fictional women and men in enigmatic, mostly undetermined spatial situations. Time seems to be suspended: People rest, walk, gaze, dance, talk, laugh, and converse—just as people do, and always have done. They live in private worlds; nothing is revealed about their status or role in the community. Even when they smile or gaze in our direction, they are primarily concerned with their own affairs. They look through binoculars at things we cannot see; they dream, reflect thoughts, or have conversations. Men communicate with men, occasionally with birds and other animals, women with women, but never a man with a woman. The mood is created by the careful observation of facial expressions, gestures, and colors. Rarely does the painter allude to the style, fashion, or culture of a particular time. Thus, in a sense, the figures are timeless and placeless.

The versatile artist describes her compositions as “composites, ciphers, riddles”—“of the world, but only partially concerned with it. Concerned with the part that gives them life, less troubled by the rest.” Each painted scene thus seems like an autonomous story that could have another chapter. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye describes the evocative titles of her paintings as an “additional brushstroke.” They are part of the work, offering clues to possible narratives, but they neither describe nor explain.

For Yiadom-Boakye, painting itself is a language, a powerful means to communicate beyond words. She begins with a color, a composition, a gesture, or a particular direction of light. Found images, memories, literature, and the history of painting serve as sources for her work. “All of that is then composed on the canvas. [This lets me] really think through the painting, to allow these to be paintings in the most physical sense, and build a language that didn’t feel as if I was trying to take something out of life and translate it into painting, but that actually allowed the paint to do the talking,” the artist describes her working method.

Each painting is a composite of various movements and poses elaborated on the surface of the canvas. The history of painting is important to Yiadom-Boakye, whose own contribution asserts that the medium has the potential to create meaning even today.

Parallel to her work as a painter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye also writes prose, dialogues, and poems, which she publishes in her exhibition catalogs, for example. For her, writing and painting are separate activities. However, as different forms of creativity, they are intertwined, and each is infused with ideas of fiction, invention, rhythm, and infinite possibilities. “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about,” she explains.

In-house curator: Maria Müller-Schareck

The exhibition has been organized by Tate Britain in cooperation with the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.

The accompanying catalog has been published by Hatje Cantz. In addition to numerous illustrations, it contains texts by the curators Andrea Schlieker and Isabella Maidment, Tate Britain, the American poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

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Stay connected: Please check our website for regular updates on our program. For further information please contact: presse [​at​] kunstsammlung.de