DUSSELDORF.- Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is presenting Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Fly in League with the Night, the first comprehensive exhibition of the painter’s work in Germany. This show exemplifies the power that painting can still have today.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977 in London) is a painter. She paints fictional women and men in enigmatic, mostly undetermined spatial situations. Time seems to be suspended: People rest, walk, gaze, dance, talk, laugh, and converse—just as people do, and always have done. They live in private worlds; nothing is revealed about their status or role in the community. Even when they smile or gaze in our direction, they are primarily concerned with their own affairs. They look through binoculars at things we cannot see; they dream, reflect thoughts, or have conversations. Men communicate with men, occasionally with birds and other animals, women with women, but never a man with a woman. The mood is created by the careful observation of facial expressions, gestures, and colors. Rarely does the painter allude to the style, fashion, or culture of a particular time. Thus, in a sense, the figures are timeless and placeless.

The versatile artist describes her compositions as “composites, ciphers, riddles”— “Of the world, but only partially concerned with it. Concerned with the part that gives them life, less troubled by the rest.” Each painted scene thus seems like an autonomous story that could have another chapter. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye describes the evocative titles of her paintings as an “additional brushstroke.” They are part of the work, offering clues to possible narratives, but they neither describe nor explain.

For Yiadom-Boakye, painting itself is a language, a powerful means to communicate beyond words. She begins with a color, a composition, a gesture, or a particular direction of light. Found images, memories, literature, and the history of painting serve as sources for her work. “All of that is then composed on the canvas. [This lets me] really think through the painting, to allow these to be paintings in the most physical sense, and build a language that didn’t feel as if I was trying to take something out of life and translate it into painting, but that actually allowed the paint to do the talking,” the artist describes her working method.




Each painting is a composite of various movements and poses elaborated on the surface of the canvas. The history of painting is important to Yiadom-Boakye, whose own contribution asserts that the medium has the potential to create meaning even today.

Parallel to her work as a painter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye also writes prose, dialogues, and poems, which she publishes in her exhibition catalogs, for example. For her, writing and painting are separate activities. However, as different forms of creativity, they are intertwined, and each is infused with ideas of fiction, invention, rhythm, and infinite possibilities. “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about,” she explains.

The depth of her engagement with art and literary history echoes in the paintings, but at the same time they tell their own, new story. Unsurprisingly, the painter has a highly varied library at her disposal. A selection of the novels, essays, and dramas she cherishes has been put aside for her exhibition (see the enclosed list and booklet accompanying the exhibition). Jazz has also had an influence on her work. In a playlist accessible via Spotify, she has compiled pieces by musicians such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and Bill Evans: https://spoti.fi/2ZKz6Vv.

In-House Curator: Maria Müller-Schareck

After solo exhibitions at the Studio Museum in New York (2010), the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Serpentine Gallery in London (2015), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2017), Fly in League with the Night is the first comprehensive exhibition that honors Yiadom-Boakye’s work in depth. Curated by Andrea Schlieker, Isabella Maidment, and Aïcha Mehrez, Tate Britain, in close collaboration with the artist, it spans early works created at the Royal Academy Schools, where she graduated in 2003, to her most recent paintings, completed in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. The artist has carefully developed the installations at the Tate Britain, the Moderna Museet, and the Kunstsammlung. Beyond chronology, she aims above all at the dialogues between the images and a rhythm of seeing that unfolds as one walks through the spaces.

The exhibition has been organized by Tate Britain in cooperation with the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.