LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAYKE: SERIES
24 May - 30 June 2007

Press Release

ARQUEBUSE is delighted to present Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery, timed to coincide with her solo exhibition at the acclaimed non-profit gallery Gasworks in London.

In the development of new images and subjects for Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings there is no model or sitter, nor any particular story or historical narrative to be expressed, instead she generates an imaginary person through her process of painting. The viewer is left to fabricate a persona for each image while Lynette absorbs and explores the history of portraiture, simultaneously claiming space for both femininity and the feminine, and a history of Africans and people of African descent, in the history of Art.
Since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2003, Yiadom-Boakye placed her cast of imaginary characters under a theatrical spotlight with a few suggestive details: perhaps a flash of red nail varnish, a saucy pair of stilettos, flared trousers, or the glaring face of a mink stole wrapped around the shoulders. These hints at personality and narrative were available because the subject was displayed as a full figure, or from the waist upwards, in the manner of traditional portraits of the great and the good. To accompany her recent inclusion in the Seville Biennial in October 2006 the curator Okwui Enwezor wrote of these paintings that they “function as a psychological dissection of the constructed self, as the viewer’s gaze is drawn to strange forms: bodies are posed in slightly awkward positions, the leering grins or bemused smirks don’t match up with the emotions of the body.”

Over the last six months Lynette has pared down both the scale of the paintings and the information provided, testing how much emotion or implied character she can express with the most minimal of means. Focusing only on the face and forfeiting any relationship with the body, the paintings have been made in series with various sets of predetermined aims, for example, all faces turning to the left. The resulting personalities arise as escape routes from the initial dry confines of these self-imposed rules.

There are markers of identity in the cut and length of the hair, but otherwise we are presented with simply the emotions of the face - the turn of a head on its shoulders, the play of light on a cheek, a narrowed glint in the eye.

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'Another type of monastery' 2006, Oil on canvas, 65 x 60 cm, (A00266)

'Heaven Help Us Thrice' 2006, Oil on linen, Approx 80 x 60 cm, (A00481)

'La vielle chouette' 2007, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm, (A00256)

'Major' 2006, Oil on canvas, 90 x 65 cm, (A00254)

'Pressure from Cannibals' 2006, Oil on linen, 65 x 55 cm, (A00262)

'With Mountains' 2007, Oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm, (A00251)