Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil on canvas paintings are large works, sometimes standing several meters high and wide.

Yiadom-Boakye, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent and a graduate in 2004 from the Royal Academy Schools, makes large scale portraits of imaginary subjects that incorporate a range of visual languages to confront subjectivity and stereotypes with the traditional medium of oil painting.

Adrian Searle has written of her work: “Previously her portraits were a cast list of grinning Grammy winners, a self-satisfied towel-robed hunk, a ditzy middle-aged woman, comfortable in her body and with a shocking red bra. But the paintings aren’t merely humorous black stereotypes. They are painted with a loose and disbelieving swagger that seems to comment both on the characters of her subjects and what we might want from portraiture in the first place.”