Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fashionable Eye
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, NY“9am Jerez de la Frontera,” 2010.
At the opening of her solo show at the Jack Shainman Gallery last April, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye wore a strapless, ruffled minidress in an of-the-moment Liberty print. The British artist could easily have been mistaken for one of the fashionable-looking characters in her large-scale, oil-on-canvas portraits, except for the fact that her subjects exist only in her imagination.
“They are suggestions of people,” said Yiadom-Boakye, 33, who was in New York last week for the opening of “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations,” her first solo museum show at the Studio Museum in Harlem on Nov. 11. “They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.”
Where that is, is anyone’s guess. The 25 fictional portraits on view give few clues. Broad brushstrokes and subdued tones draw on formal aspects of traditional portraiture, but her subjects are of African descent. The backgrounds, devoid of the possessions that would denote social standing, time or place, swirl into murky nothingness drawing the eye to their seemingly contemporary ensembles.
Yiadom-Boakye insists that clothes are not her focus, and that the painted accouterments are arbitrary.
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“Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010.” Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, NY
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“Lynette works in modes of appropriation, all her paintings are a collage,” said Naomi Beckwith, the show’s curator, pointing out that in “Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010,” for which the show is named, Yiadom-Boakye is referencing John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait, “Dr. Pozzi at Home.” “In this case, she is quoting social portraits of stylish and fashionable people.”
In both portraits the subjects wear identical blood-red robes, but while Dr. Pozzi is almost overpowered by his — some critics think of his portrait as “red with a face” — the seated man in Ms. Yiadom-Boakye’s work is incredibly imposing. “[Many of] the poses and the gestures suggest self-presentation or an exhibitionist dimension,” said the critic and curator Okwui Enwezor. “But clothing is not really the primary thing. It’s about visibility and invisibility. She has really figured out conceptually how to insert a black figure into the discourse.”
Yiadom-Boakye’s star has been on the rise since her work appeared in Flow, a critically acclaimed survey of emerging African diaspora artists (her parents are Ghanain) hosted by the Studio Museum in 2008. At the Armory Show in March this year, a month before the show at Jack Shainman, her European gallery, Faye Fleming & Partner, dedicated its entire stand to her work.
In “Wrist Action, 2010,” a young black woman with a wide smile wears a white turtleneck and dark trousers. One hand is enrobed in a salmon-pink glove that is threatening to melt into a blob. It’s as if Yiadom-Boakye is throwing down the gauntlet (literally), using the accessory as an excuse for what she wants to do with form.
She says: “Painting for me is the subject. The figures exist only through paint, through color, line, tone and mark-making.”
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