Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Solo Show

Kunsthalle Basel presents Lynette Yiadom-Boakye‘s first exhibition in Switzerland. In this exhibition the artist shows a selection of new paintings from her prolific practice.

In her first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977 in London; lives and works in London) fills the majestic, skylit upstairs galleries of Kunsthalle Basel with all new paintings, lush and vibrant reflections on perception, painting, and the figure. At once traditional in her approach to form, line, and color, and decidedly contemporary in her self-reflexivity about her medium, the British-Ghanaian writer, poet, and painter represents a bold and beautiful cast of black figures culled from the haze of memory, projection, and fiction. The goal is not formal perfection, or exactitude with regard to any real person, but another sort of precision, one that aims to, “make people intelligible through paint.”

As she has explained: “Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me. They are imbued with a power of their own; they have a resonance – something emphatic and otherworldly. I admire them for their strength, their moral fiber. If they are pathetic, they don’t survive; if I feel sorry for them, I get rid of them. I don’t like to paint victims.”