Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (1977 – )

Lynette Yiadom Boakye is an artist of Ghanaian descent based in London.  Boakye attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Falmouth University and the Royal Academy Schools. Her paintings are predominantly figurative, created with raw and muted colours. Although portraiture may appear the dominant theme of her work, her subject are drawn from imagination rather than life study as Chris Wiley writes; 

The figures in Yiadom-Boakye's paintings assume a variety of paradigmatic guises - dancers, bathers, revolutionaries, introspective romantics, and brash individulalists - and formally, they recall the work of ninetieenth-century painters from Whistler to Manet. Quite unusual with respect to these fromal precedents is the fact that her characters seem to defy viewers' ability to draw any conclusive associations of class, place or at times even gender.

Yiadom-Boakye has shown work internationally, most recently at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, as part of Massamiliano Gioni's exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. She has also been included in the Gwangju Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor, Korea; Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and M25. Around London curated by Barry Schwabsky at the CCA Andratz, Mallorca; the Seville Biennale 2006, curated by Okwui Enwezor and many others including John Moores 23; the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, Direct Painting at Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany; 2004 Bloomberg New Contemporaries at various venues throughout the UK and Blackout at Brixton Art Gallery. 

In 2013 Yiadom-Boakye was nominated for the Turner Prize for her 2012 exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in east London.