The Serpentine is delighted to present this new book on the occasion of the exhibition Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
At the heart of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work is an exploration of the traditions of painting through a focus on technique, structure, composition and colour palette as a tool for exploring questions around identity and representation in art. The Serpentine Gallery exhibition comprises of recent and newly produced paintings and etchings, from which a selection is reproduced within this publication.
Alongside her painting, Yiadom-Boakye is an avid writer of short stories. She perceives her writing as an activity that runs parallel to her visual practice and her textual narratives are similar to those constructed in her paintings. This publication is conceived as a platform to present the wider scope of her work and at its core is a compendium of her writings, which oscillate between lyrical poems and fable-like macabre short stories, including three new texts: The Half-Smile, Problems With The Moon, and An Inquisition To Divine The Necessary Things.
Renowned New York-based writer Hilton Als has contributed an essay that examines Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings in relation to the viewer. Artist and curator Glenn Ligon’s fictional text On the Hour, On the Time draws inspiration from the artist’s series of paintings of men wearing striped shirts, and, the exhibition’s curator Amira Gad has also written an introductory essay on Yiadom-Boakye’s work that reveals the art-historical and literary references that lie in her paintings.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s (b. 1977, London) oil paintings depict figures that appear to exist outside of a specific time and place. There are very few references to background, history, activity and place of the individuals and groups of figures in her paintings. This ambiguity, which also resonates in the enigmatic titles given to each work, invites the viewer to consider the subjects as suggestions rather than explicit narratives or specific portraits. At the heart of Yiadom-Boakye’s work is an exploration of the mechanics of painting, where she reconstructs the meaning that contemporary painting could hold, in all its unexpected beauty and idiosyncratic details. Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery was a survey of recent work presenting a comprehensive range of painterly techniques, representing the artist’s key series of works. Throughout her work, Yiadom-Boakye has raised timeless questions of identity and representation in art, bringing awareness to such matters and the shortcomings of art history.
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