Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Painting is Presence

The Nation

Ratik Asokan reviews Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s recent exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher at the New Museum, New York. Asokan observes: “For a portraitist, it’s a strange approach. But perhaps we aren’t dealing with portraiture. Abstract painting, as defined by Octavio Paz, ‘suggests contemplation to us—not of what it shows but of a presence which the colors and […]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits

The New Yorker

Zadie Smith profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher is on view at the New Museum, New York through September 3, 2017. Smith writes: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character […]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Vogue Magazine

Dodie Kazanjian profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher will be on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, from May 3 – September 3, 2017. Kazanjian writes: “Most [of Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings] are large-scale, single-figure studies whose faces, set against loosely brushed dark backgrounds, look directly at the viewer. […]