The Hilton ALS Series

Yale Center for British Art • New Haven, CT • britishart.yale.edu • Through December 15, 2019

A sampling of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s mesmerizing portraits, on exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, brings to New England the 42-year old painter’s bravura, gestural brushwork. In Harp-Strum, muscular dancers in emerald-toned leotards leap and reach across a diffused field of spring greens. The youth in Greenhouse Fantasies peers out with a direct gaze, dark eyes steady. A dab of blue—wild iris, perhaps—breaks up the space surrounding his shaded cheeks and jowls.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Harp-Strum, 2016, oil on canvas, diptych: 70 7/8 x 78 ¾” (each painting), The Rachofsky Collection, © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Corvi-Mora, London.

Yiadom-Boakye does not use studio models: Her fully human subjects are her own inventions. “I work from scrapbooks, I work from drawings, I work from my imagination, a combination of all of those things; the figures are kind of fictitious, they’re found images,” she said in a 2013 video interview. Born in London to Ghanaian parents, Yiadom-Boakye sculpts with light and shadow her subjects individualized brown tones wanting us to see “persons of color” apart from the white gaze. “What I’ve been trying to do more recently is build each painting out of colors,” she said, “that sort of change the undertone of the skin; there’s always this balancing of different colors, and to me it was really about that.” (And giving substance to memory’s prompts, Yiadom-Boakye’s aim is to complete a painting in a day.)

In 1 pm, Mason’s Yard, a woman relaxes in a roomy chair, long legs crossed, an elbow leaning into a padded armrest, fingers touching her face. The sofa is dotted with greens and blues. A potted plant is suspended between gold and blue-green planes of color, leaves cupping a tropical bloom. She looks away, meditating or conversing with a friend.

This is the second in a series of three exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art devoted to contemporary female British painters and curated by The New Yorker theater critic and Pulitzer Prize-winner Hilton Als. His choice of Yiadom-Boakye further situates the young painter within a group of contemporaries, likewise heralded for portraiture, Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, Mickalene Thomas and Kerry James Marshall among them, re-framing art history through Pan-African perspectives.