Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night celebrates the work of one of the most significant and acclaimed figurative painters of her generation.
Fact and fiction fuse Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings: they appear to be portraits, yet the people she depicts are not real but invented. Created from a composite of found images and her own imagination, her characters seem to exist outside of a specific time or place: they feel at once familiar yet mysterious. This ambiguity resonates again in the enigmatic titles she gives to her artworks.
The artist is also a writer of poetry and prose, and for her, the two forms of creativity complement each other: ‘The things I can’t paint, I write, and the things I can’t write, I paint.’
This lavishly illustrated publication provides a comprehensive account of Yiadom-Boakye’s practice over the past two decades. With essays by the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander and curators Isabella Maidment and Andrea Schlieker, alongside NEW writing by Yiadom-Boakye, this insightful monograph reflects the dual aspects of the artist’s practice as both a painter and a writer and provides an intimate insight into her creative process.
Yiadom-Boakye’s work is a celebration of the vital importance and critical significance of painting today. ‘The best I can hope for’, she has said, ‘is that people feel perhaps a little of what I feel, what I love, and why I love it. And how that love keeps me going.’