Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Solo im New Museum, NY

Ihre viel beachtete Soloshow im New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York ist noch bis 3. September 2017 anzuschauen. Im Art-Report-Ranking sollte ihr mit dieser Ausstellung in diesem Jahr der Aufstieg unter die Top 1000 gelingen. Zuvor hatte die New Yorker Malerin Lynette Yiadom-Boakye mit Einzelausstellungen u.a. in der Kunsthalle Basel und der Serpentine Gallery auf sich aufmerksam gemacht.

Profile:
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings focus on fictional figures that exist outside of specific times and places. In a 2010 interview with Nadine Rubin Nathan in the New York Times Magazine, Yiadom-Boakye described her compositions as “suggestions of people...They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” This lack of fixed narrative leaves her work open to the projected imagination of the viewer.
Her paintings are rooted in traditional formal considerations such as line, color, and scale, and can be self-reflexive about the medium itself, but the subjects and the way in which the paint is handled is decidedly contemporary. Yiadom- Boakye’s paintings are typically completed in a day to best capture a single moment or stream of consciousness.
Her predominantly black cast of characters often attracts attention. In a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Kaleidoscope, she explained, “Race is something that I can completely manipulate, or reinvent, or use as I want to. Also, they’re all black because...I’m not white.” However Yiadom-Boakye maintains, “People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.” Jack Shainman Gallery