Fly In League With The Night

Fly In League With The Night is the largest survey to date of the work of British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London). The exhibition presents 67 paintings spanning two decades.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye makes figurative paintings drawn from a variety of source material. Her figures inhabit deliberately enigmatic settings that are timeless and often abstract. Working in oil paint on canvas or coarse linen, she has developed a language of painting that is uniquely her own.

Fly In League With The Night is the first exhibition to celebrate Yiadom-Boakye’s work in depth. It spans work that she made as a student at London’s Royal Academy Schools up to her most recent paintings made in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Yiadom-Boakye has been closely involved in the selection and arrangement of her work. The exhibition evolves according to the dynamics and conversations between paintings, without a strict chronology. ‘I wanted to think about a dialogue between the works, much the way I do when they’re in the studio, and also to consider the sequence or rhythm as you move through the galleries’ the artist explains.

The individual paintings do not have explanatory labels. Instead, you are invited to engage with Yiadom-Boakye’s works on their own terms. ‘There are so many things that I do or think about when painting that I can’t put into words. Any attempt at explanation can become, at best, superfluous. At worst, wholly inaccurate.’

Yiadom-Boakye is both a painter and a writer of prose and poetry. For her, the two forms of creativity are separate but intertwined. ‘I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about,’ she has said. She refers to her paintings’ evocative titles as ‘an extra brush-mark’. They are integral to each work but are not an explanation or description.’ The exhibition’s title is from a poem by the artist, written especially for this presentation Fly In League With The Night: