Lynette Yiadom Boakye

Biography:

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a painter and writer of Ghanaian descent born in London, England, where she currently lives and works. She is represented by the Corvi-Mora Gallery in London and by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's parents were both originally from Ghana. After arriving in the UK, her parents worked as nurses for the NHS. Yiadom-Boakye attended Central St Martins College of Art and Design, graduated from Falmouth College of Art in 2000, and completed an MA degree at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003.
Art
Her paintings are predominantly figurative with raw and muted colours. With her expressive representations of the human figure, the artist examines the formal mechanisms of the medium of painting and reveals political and psychological dimensions in her works, which focus on fictional characters who exist beyond our world in a different time and in an unknown location. She paints figures that are intentionally removed from time and place, and has stated, “People ask me, ‘Who are they, where are they?’ What they should be asking is ‘What are they?’ ”
Her work is included in the permanent collections of a number of institutions, including the Tate Collection, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Miami Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Nasher Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African Art, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Her most recent exhibition was at London's Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2015.
She recently exhibited work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. The show, entitled "Under-Song For A Cipher, opened in May of 2017, and ran through September 3rd, 2017. The show was profiled by Zadie Smith for The New Yorker in its June 2017 issue.
Awards
In 2006, Yiadom-Boakye won The Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting. In 2012, she won the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize. In 2013, Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for her exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 2012.
Recently, Yiadom-Boakye exhibited a solo show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art titled Under-Song For a Cipher. Other solo exhibitions in recent years include A Passion To A Principle at Kunsthalle Basel, and Sorrow for A Cipher at Corvi-Mora, both in 2016. A solo exhibition in 2015 at the Serpentine Gallery in London was titled Verses After Dusk. The artist exhibited in The Central Pavilion at the 55th International Venice Biennale in 2013 with her exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. She has also participated in the 12th Sharjah Biennial, in the UAE (2015), and 11th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, France (2012).

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