"Yiadom-Boakye paints… 'little gaps of solitude and silence' and distills profound emotions into a single glance or small gesture brimming with eloquence. She posits tranquillity as a form of resistance, serenity as meaningful act." —Andrea Schlieker
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night
Edited with text by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker. Text by Elizabeth Alexander, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Dramatically reinventing the lineage of Goya, Sargent and Manet, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye imbues the Black subjects in her paintings with atmospheric grace and elegance
A New York Times 2020 holiday gift guide pick A New York Times critics' pick A Publishers Weekly 2020 holiday gift guide pick
Taking inspiration from the techniques of historic European portraiture, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings could almost be from a much older era if it were not for the contemporary details of the Black subjects that populate her work. Though her subjects are people conjured in her imagination, Yiadom-Boakye imbues her portraits with a near-tangible spirit through her deliberate brush strokes and rich dark tones.
The result is paintings that seem to exist outside of time while still remaining grounded in reality. This lavishly illustrated volume of nearly 80 paintings and drawings—some of which have never been exhibited before—accompanies the first major survey of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, shown at Tate Britain. In addition to new fiction writing by the artist, this publication includes in-depth thematic essays on Yiadom-Boakye’s artistic development, reflecting the dual aspects of the artist’s career as both a painter and a writer and offering an intimate insight into her creative process.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her atmospheric oil paintings that depict imagined sitters in dark color palettes, executed with a contemporary sensibility while still rooted in an art historical practice. She attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize.
"Tie the Temptress to the Trojan" (2018) is reproduced from 'Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Publishers Weekly
Liz Hartman
Taking inspiration from the techniques of historic European portraiture, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye reinvents the lineage of Goya, Sargent, and Manet, imbuing the Black subjects in her paintings with atmospheric grace and elegance. This volume of nearly 80 paintings, drawings, and prints accompanies the first major survey of her work at the Tate Britain. In addition to the artist’s own writing and poetry, the book includes thematic essays on her development as well as a critical examination of the larger history of portraiture, focusing particularly on the depiction of Black subjects.
Galerie
Lucy Rees
Known for her dreamy, instinctive paintings of Black fictitious characters, Yiadom-Boakye [...] takes inspiration from the historic conventions of European portraiture. [...] She is also a talented writer, and her new fiction features prominently in the book. As she once said: “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.”
Financial Times
Baya Simons
British artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings might appear, at first glance, to be traditional portraits. However, these are not faithful representations of black people, but rather imaginary figures conjured up by the artist. Her fictitious subjects occupy timeless worlds: at ballet classes; drinking champagne or cups of tea. “There are ideas about how a black body should be, should move, what blackness means,” she says of the decision to paint from her imagination. “I can divorce the work from that expectation of reality and refer to a different reality.” In this new title [...]her rich, psychologically complex works are presented.
AnOther
Isabella Maidment
British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye conjures dark, mesmerising oil paintings of imagined Black subjects. The portraits, which are pulled entirely from her mind, are both contemporary and classical: fusing older European aesthetics with modern, everyday embellishments. Fly In League With The Night is the first major survey of the artist’s work, and contains nearly 80 lavish paintings and drawings – some never seen before.
Art Newspaper
Jose da Silva
Yiadom-Boakye’s figurative paintings of Black people are often pared-back and seem to evade any concrete meaning. And the more you look at and study her work, “the more enigmatic it becomes.”
Guardian
Jonathan Jones
Again and again Yiadom-Boakye portrays black faces in darkness. It’s her deepest foray into the past of painting: into the realm of chiaroscuro, the melting luxury of shadows that reached its apogee in the Dutch golden age, when Rembrandt and his pupils basked in nighttime settings that intimate the soul.
Time Out London
Eddy Frankel
Thick and rough with the brush but just precise enough [...] Yiadom-Boakye has reshaped art history in her image, swapped the endless white faces of the portraits of the past for a small handful of black ones ... Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates a universe with no answers, no end points, just a million stories to lose yourself in.
New York Times
Lauren Christensen
The oil portraits collected in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League With the Night depict people the contemporary British artist has imagined into being, and allude to the long tradition of European portraiture by men like Rembrandt, Goya and Degas — only to overturn these examples, making the message, and the medium, her own.
Frieze
Aurella Yussuf
‘Fly In League With The Night’ is brimming with characters we can feel, but whose stories remain tantalizingly out of reach.
Brooklyn Rail
Bartolomeo Sala
Such appropriations of European oil painting and its conventions, far from signalling an escape into academism and nostalgia, on the contrary, accomplish something sort of radical. In a world in which Blackness continues to be fetishized and objectified even when it is celebrated—Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings carve out a space where Black personhood, “unconstrained by the nightmare fantasies of others,” is finally afforded the luxury to be, to breathe.
Dazed
Miss Rosen
British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is taking the world by storm with her extraordinary portraits of fictional folk, which she conjures from the depths of her rich imagination and lovingly renders in paint.
Artforum
Rianna Jade Parker
Entrancing portraits of imagined characters, painted from memory, meditate deeply on how history is made and unmade.
New York Magazine
Tembe Denton-Hurst
When we asked curator Larry Ossei-Mensah about the ten things he can’t live without, he mentioned this book, which accompanies Yiadom-Boakye’s show at the Tate Britain. She draws inspiration from historic European portraiture techniques with a focus on Black subjects. Ossei-Mensah has been following the artist for a decade: “I study her paintings because I mentor a lot of young emerging artists and want to give them advice, and she’s one of the best,” he says.
STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.
FROM THE BOOK
Excerpt from Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild
by Elizabeth Alexander
"…I think of the deep understanding of human exchange, as well as all we never understand about each other. No matter how deep our intimacy, we are still vastly unknowable to each other. I have wished, with loved ones, to be inside of them, to know all that they think, to possess their memories, to see through their eyes. I have wished to step into their pelts and walk as they do. I have wished sometimes to grab them with my teeth by the scruffs of their necks – children, lovers, the best of friends – and carry them to the cave of mutual understanding. Intimacy is that animal and intense. The fascination as well as the vexation of intimacy is that we can never, truly, know each other completely.
Yet the light that insists its way through darkness is our human bond. Lucille Clifton: ‘the light insists on itself in the world’. It is miraculous, given all that shrouds us, that we come close together as often as we do. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings believe in and make available that indelible truth. We may sometimes struggle to see each other, to come near each other. We may stand in close proximity and look directly at each other, as her paintings invite, but it takes several passes, several exchanges, the passage of time, to actually see and know each other more deeply."
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's extraordinary "Citrine By The Ounce" (2014) is reproduced from Fly In League With The Night, reviewed this week in Hyperallergic. Featuring 120 color reproductions alongside writing by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker, Elizabeth Alexander and Yiadom-Boakye herself, this is without doubt one of the most inspiring art books of 2021. As Elizabeth Alexander writes, "These paintings make you want to stand in front of them again and again and return to the souls residing within. The bottomlessness of these paintings is like the bottomlessness of intimacy." continue to blog
Titled "A Passion Like No Other," this mesmerizing 2012 oil painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is reproduced from Fly In League With The Night, published to accompany the first major survey of the artist's work, on view at Tate through May 2021. Featuring 120 color reproductions and texts by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker, Elizabeth Alexander and Yiadom-Boakye, who is also a gifted writer, this is a must-have book for all home, academic, gallery and museum art libraries, as well as one of our top Black History Month Staff Picks for 2021. "In Yiadom-Boakye’s mode of portraiture, fictionalized subjects of even temperament are the unwavering coordinates within which she quarries states of quiet conviviality and contemplation," Andrea Schlieker writes. "Their gaze elicits empathy, their very lassitude relays an urgent call: in a world dominated by an inflation of images, words and noise, of continually expanding metropoles, ever greater pressures of work and the increasing velocity of life, it becomes both psychologically and politically important to assert these spaces of stillness and repose, places in which people are doing nothing. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze spoke of the importance of 'providing little gaps of solitude and silence… because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.' Yiadom-Boakye paints these 'little gaps of solitude and silence' and distils profound emotions into a single glance or small gesture brimming with eloquence. She posits tranquility as a form of resistance, serenity as meaningful act." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.75 in. / 192 pgs / 120 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $76.95 ISBN: 9781942884651 PUBLISHER: D.A.P./Tate AVAILABLE: 12/8/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night
Published by D.A.P./Tate. Edited with text by Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker. Text by Elizabeth Alexander, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Dramatically reinventing the lineage of Goya, Sargent and Manet, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye imbues the Black subjects in her paintings with atmospheric grace and elegance
A New York Times 2020 holiday gift guide pick
A New York Times critics' pick
A Publishers Weekly 2020 holiday gift guide pick
Taking inspiration from the techniques of historic European portraiture, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings could almost be from a much older era if it were not for the contemporary details of the Black subjects that populate her work. Though her subjects are people conjured in her imagination, Yiadom-Boakye imbues her portraits with a near-tangible spirit through her deliberate brush strokes and rich dark tones.
The result is paintings that seem to exist outside of time while still remaining grounded in reality. This lavishly illustrated volume of nearly 80 paintings and drawings—some of which have never been exhibited before—accompanies the first major survey of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, shown at Tate Britain. In addition to new fiction writing by the artist, this publication includes in-depth thematic essays on Yiadom-Boakye’s artistic development, reflecting the dual aspects of the artist’s career as both a painter and a writer and offering an intimate insight into her creative process.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (born 1977) is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her atmospheric oil paintings that depict imagined sitters in dark color palettes, executed with a contemporary sensibility while still rooted in an art historical practice. She attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize.
