Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: No Twilight Too Mighty

Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller  

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: No Twilight Too Mighty, an exhibition of over 70 works made from 2020 to 2023, all on display for the first time, by artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The show provides a remarkable opportunity to observe the continuum in the artist’s painterly practice of creating evocative paintings that relate to the human experience. The exhibition includes a selection of charcoal and chalk drawings, which have a sense of immediacy given their intimate scale and air of improvisation. Seen in tandem with the paintings, the depth of the artist’s skillful handling of different media is evident.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) is celebrated for her paintings of timeless subjects in everyday moments of happiness, comradery, and solitude. Her lush oils on canvas or coarse linen portray fictitious characters rendered in loose brushwork set against dramatic backgrounds. The artist does not work from models, rather the figures are composites, drawn from different sources including scrapbooks and drawings, memories and observations of everyday life. Details including clothing or costumes, footwear or the lack thereof dislocate the figures from any particular time or place. Animals such as birds, foxes, owls and dogs that make regular appearances in Yiadom-Boakye’s work, casually suggesting they are pets even if some are indeed wild animals, add to the sense of intrigue. The paintings invite the viewer to slow down and to carefully observe; to enter the imaginary visual tales the artist spins. The poetic and thought-provoking titles of the works reinforce that much is left to the imagination of the beholder. 

Yiadom-Boakye’s practice is based on a profound interest in what can be achieved in paint, its materiality, the potential of color and of composition. Her interest in the material aspects of painting led her from a meticulous approach of working with live models to making figures of her own creation, thus freeing her to paint more spontaneously with less concern for technical precision.

The artist’s parallel practice of writing is visible in the imaginative titles that accompany the artworks acting as companions rather than explanations of the works. The artist has described her relationship to the two disciplines saying, “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.”

Literature, poetry and music are some of the creative forces that feed Yiadom-Boakye’s practices as a painter and a writer. Authors such as James Baldwin, Okwui Enwezor, and Toni Morrison serve as ongoing sources of inspiration for the artist. A selection of such texts will be on display in a reading room adjacent to the exhibition. Likewise, a playlist compiled by the artist specifically for this exhibition will be available to visitors.