2023/07/26 by Eileen John · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Cinema and Media Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayad002
openalex publication_date 2023/07/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
If you can, take the chance to see this exhibition of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paintings. This survey of her works opened briefly at Tate Britain in 2020 and has now returned to audiences perhaps still distinctively appreciative of this Covid-disrupted pleasure. There are seventy or so paintings, and nearly all could be experienced as portraits. Single human figures or faces are given luxurious, oil-painted realization. Sometimes two or a few figures are the focus, and sometimes a kind of landscape—a beach or stretch of land—takes up a fuller role as the place in which these figures walk, sit, lounge, play or talk. But it is immersion in the individual human figure, in how it can be made present in paint, that is the ‘hook’ here. It feels like a respite to enter into Yiadom-Boakye’s steady, deep focus on this project. That these human-figure-centric works are not portraits, because they are not paintings of real people, is part of what is engrossing about this body of work.