To Improvise a Mountain touring exhibition

Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds: May 16–October 5, 2025
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes: October 25, 2025–February 8, 2026
Nottingham Castle, Nottingham: March 20–June 21, 2026 

Hayward Gallery Touring presents To Improvise a Mountain, a group exhibition curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, one of the most important figurative painters today. For this exhibition, Yiadom-Boakye selects works that have been critical to her way of seeing and thinking, inviting audiences around the UK on a deeply personal journey across different geographies and generations of artists.

First coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Yiadom-Boakye is both an artist and a writer who is renowned for her oil paintings of imagined subjects. Assertive presences who yet seem to exist outside of any definable time or place, her figures are hailed for both their technical mastery and lingering, enigmatic quality.

Developed by the artist in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring, To Improvise a Mountain will bring Yiadom-Boakye’s work into conversation with an eclectic range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process. Featured artists will include: Bas Jan Ader, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, David Wojnarowicz and more.

The exhibition's curatorial spirit stems from a fragment of poetry within Miles Davis’s “Inamorata” (1971), which asks: “Who is this music that which description may never justify? / Can the ocean be described?.” For Yiadom-Boakye, poetry’s ability to translate the intangible into images the mind can hold, and to think through rhythm and feeling, is similar to the act of painting.

Yiadom-Boakye expands: “My deployment of words in writing is not always so different to my use of brush marks in painting. The logic, patterns, relationships, repetitions and decisions are guided by intuition — the rightness and wrongness, the blatancies and subtleties — and that’s how I want to approach this show.”

To Improvise a Mountain will offer a deeply personal interweaving of artworks that create their own emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder. Ranging from the visceral Post-Impressionism of painter Walter Sickert to the video essays of Otolith Group, for Yiadom-Boakye “the governing principle, the dialogue between the works in the show, is that spirit of infinite knowledge and infinite knowing that poetry allows us.”

To Improvise a Mountain: Curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with Hayward Gallery Touring. The exhibition is developed in partnership with Leeds Art Gallery, MK Gallery, and Nottingham Castle, supporting the Southbank Centre’s ongoing mission to create experiences for the nation’s enjoyment.