Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

London, United Kingdom

Art Medium

Painting

Art Style

Contemporary Figurative & Portraits

About the Artist

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a highly acclaimed British artist renowned for her compelling oil paintings that exclusively depict imagined, fictional Black figures. Her distinctive portraits, often rendered in a restrained palette of dark tones and loose brushwork, are never painted from life or photographs, but rather emerge from her own imagination. Yiadom-Boakye's practice profoundly explores themes of identity, representation, and the act of looking, challenging historical precedents in portraiture. Her figures possess a timeless quality, inviting viewers to project their own narratives and emotions onto them, thereby engaging in a powerful dialogue about presence, absence, and the complexities of subjectivity.