Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977)

Yiadom-Boakye began to receive widespread critical recognition from 2010 onwards. After graduating from the MA course at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003, she was included in an exhibition of upcoming British artists organised by Charles Saatchi, Newspeak: British Art Now, which was held in Moscow and London in 2009–10. She then held exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, before Corvi-Mora Gallery in London came to represent her. She held her first solo exhibition there in 2011 and has exhibited there regularly ever since. She was nominated for the Turner Prize 2013, which was followed the next year by the first monograph about her (Prestel). Her work has been included in many thematic museum exhibitions including All Too Human at Tate Britain in 2018, which set her work in a lineage of painting that started with Walter Sickert and included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and others. Yiadom-Boakye’s place amongst the most successful contemporary painters of her generation was cemented in 2020–22 when a retrospective exhibition of her work toured to Tate Britain in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and Mudam Luxembourg in Luxembourg.

To date, her pictures have represented only black figures, and through her work she responds to the historic underrepresentation of black people in Western painting. When asked about the relationship between racial politics and the content of her work, she has stated that ‘I’ve never distinguished my politics from my life. It's in the fabric of what I'm doing.’