Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Enigmatic Portraits Take Over Tate Britain

Tate Britain presents 'Fly in League with the Night', a major solo exhibition dedicated to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977), a London-based artist of Ghanaian origin. The show features over seventy oil paintings spanning two decades, starting from her 2003 graduate thesis at the Royal Academy of Arts. Yiadom-Boakye is known for her enigmatic, entirely imagined figures rendered in dark tonalities, with no reference to African tribal art, recycled materials, masks, or sculptures. The exhibition is introduced by Hew Locke's colorful papier-mâché procession 'The Procession' (2022), which critiques African colonization. Yiadom-Boakye's portraits avoid naturalism, ancestral traditions, or animism, instead presenting a modern, European-influenced aesthetic. Her subjects—men, women, and children—are depicted with quiet expressions, lacking specific identities or settings, inviting viewers to contemplate issues of identity and representation. The backgrounds sometimes evoke Ghanaian green, mud, sand, or English black-and-white tiles. The exhibition runs until February 26, 2023, at Tate Britain, Millbank.