Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2005

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although there are less red tonalities in the floor in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The canvas tension is a little slack. Close inspection reveals an extremely faint horizontal stretcher bar impression across the centre. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Isolated in a field of swiftly scumbled pigment, the compact yet imposing figure in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Cemetery boldly stares at the viewer; her uninhibited posture and twisted smile are endowed with potent and unsettling authority. In connection to the title – her paintings are typically named via word or image association – this piece, though somewhat sober, subverts the traditional language of bereavement. Sporting the customary funereal colour of mourning, the figure’s black dress is however offset by a set of bright red tights in tandem with a grimace that is neither sympathetic nor melancholic. Executed in 2005 with an old-fashioned fluidity of painterly handling – a technical facility that has garnered critical acclaim – Cemetery is typical of Yiadom-Boakye’s beautifully painted, mysterious and enigmatically unsettling practice.

Using sources that are distinctly non-contemporary, her works are entrenched in the history of painting and devices of traditional portraiture. A survey of fin de siècle art provides the direct precedent for the artist's portrayal of the human subject. In particular, the likes of Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Walter Sickert comprise central reference points; their pictorial un-doing of mimetic representation enacts a formal power that is redolent in Yiadom-Boakye’s work.

Such a straightforward concession to art history is nonetheless unmistakably troubled. Where racial Otherness in the history of western art is largely silent or typecast, Yiadom-Boakye re-casts historical white subjectivity as a pantheon of entirely fictional and imagined black characters. Herein, Yiadom-Boakye unpacks the racial politics of portraiture via jarring normalcy and mundanity: “When the issue of colour comes up, I think it would be a lot stranger if they were white; after all, I was raised by black people… for me this sense of a kind of normality isn’t necessarily celebratory, it’s more a general idea of normality. This is a political gesture for me. We’re used to looking at portraits of white people in painting” (Ibid.). Often androgynous and spurning discernable class traits and temporal indicators, her figures appear distinctly generic and ordinary. Though planeness of dress and dislocation from both time and context work to disrupt otherness and orientalising constructs of black picturing, the central locus of tension and big event in Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases principally resides in the leering stare or grimace of her subjects. Sometimes threatening, but never vulnerable, her protagonists are unambiguously empowered.