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Lot Essay
A self-assured man commands the entire composition of this half-length portrait, his enigmatic expression and posture suggesting a complex array of emotions. Leaning slightly toward the viewer, hands on hips, he glances sharply to across to his left, his eyes darting towards the unknown. His barely parted lips suggest either a deep breath or a long sigh, compounding the sense of mystery inherent in the work. The palpable sense of uncertainty in The Quickness is emblematic of the acclaimed artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly practice, whose eloquent articulations of the full complexity of human subjectivity through confident, expeditious brushstrokes infuse vibrancy into the most traditional of mediums and subjects.
The people who populate Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases, while inhabiting the portrait genre’s conventional framework, are not portraits; Yiadom-Boakye fabricates her figures not from life but from a mental collage of found images, memory, and a vivid imagination intermingled with a certain spontaneity expressed through painterly improvisation. Her revelatory command over her somber tones and electric finishes denote Yiadom-Boakye as a successor to a great lineage of Western portraitists such as Frans Hals, Goya, Whistler and Sargent, she composes her subjects as a novelist. Her subjects are reminiscent of those of Leo Tolstoy or Gabriel García Márquez in their ability to be more realistic than reality—unencumbered from traditional modes of representation, the viewer is able to intimately examine these figures, inscribing their own stories onto the image. Contemplating her figures, the artist notes that “I don’t really see them as “characters” in the individual sense, as personalities or people with specific traits. I always things of them as somehow beyond these things. They exist entirely in paint” (quoted in N. Bell and M. Gioni, “Interview with Lynette, Yiadom-Boakye,” in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, ed. T. Ballard, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2016, p. 19).
Layers of oil paint are applied wet-on-wet in the time-honored traditions of the Old Masters. Yiadom-Boakye’s energetic mark-making is a virtuoso exercise in color, her sophisticated underpainting and deep background revealing the sheer exuberance of her talents, her deftly applied brushstrokes loosely constructing her figure into a compelling persona. The artist interrupts her essentially tonal palette with bright shoots of vibrant color, especially in the passages of scarlet red framing the figure’s forearms. Judiciously selected areas of bare primed canvas shine through with a blinding white and become foils, accentuating the composition’s chromatic complexity and emphasizing the many layers of pigment applied across the majority of the canvas, causing the work to sparkle in spite of its overall paired back palette. Yiadom-Boakye works without any disegno—underdrawings which provides a compositional guide—instead painting with pure colors like the Venetians: Titian, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo.
The Quickness achieves an evocative sense of timelessness, exhumed of any notion of contemporaneity of temporality. Yiadom-Boakye depicts her figure in an ambiguous setting and without any markers of time or space, allowing for a full enjoyment of character and emotional charge in this ethereal composition. Noting the powerful emotive energy in these paintings, scholar and poet Elizabeth Alexander writes, “each painting is like looking into a story or an entire life… there are entire lives inside one frame, one poem, entire souls and stories inside the singletons and groups in these paintings” (E. Alexander, “Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild,” in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in Leage with the Night, eds. I. Maidment and A. Schlieker, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2020, p. 89). The figure’s charged gaze imbeds a deep psychological power into the work, which, coupled with the artist’s technical mastery, evokes the spirit of Diego Velázquez, particularly in his portrait of the Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. Yiadom-Boakye is a careful student of art history, her citations of her antecedents visible in her figures’ chosen postures and poses which evidence the multitudes of monographs of Degas, Manet, and others filling her studio. The Quickness is thus simultaneously a part of, and yet confrontational to, the histories of Black subjects in Western portraiture from the first instance of representation in Jan Jansz Mostaert’s Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?) from the early sixteenth century to Gustav Klimt’s newly rediscovered portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona.
Yiadom-Boakye is a writer and a poet as well as a painter, and views her artistic practice as writing a poem in paint, drawing out strong and universal emotions, compiling a lifetime of stories into a singular figure. Her titles are allusive as her characters, which Yiadom-Boakye considers simply as “an extra mark in the paintings… I don’t paint about writing or write about paintings. It’s just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about” (Y. Boakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, New Yorker June 19, 2017 p. 52). The Quickness was painted at a critical year for the artist, when she was a finalist for the Turner Price and was presented at the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale—she returned to the biennale in 2019 with a solo show for the first iteration of the Ghana pavilion. She has since reached the highest echelons of contemporary art, holding prestigious solo shows at the Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Basel; the New Museum, New York; and Tate Britian, London. Widely feted, she has achieved many accolades, including the Next Generation Price from the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Carnegie Prize.
The people who populate Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases, while inhabiting the portrait genre’s conventional framework, are not portraits; Yiadom-Boakye fabricates her figures not from life but from a mental collage of found images, memory, and a vivid imagination intermingled with a certain spontaneity expressed through painterly improvisation. Her revelatory command over her somber tones and electric finishes denote Yiadom-Boakye as a successor to a great lineage of Western portraitists such as Frans Hals, Goya, Whistler and Sargent, she composes her subjects as a novelist. Her subjects are reminiscent of those of Leo Tolstoy or Gabriel García Márquez in their ability to be more realistic than reality—unencumbered from traditional modes of representation, the viewer is able to intimately examine these figures, inscribing their own stories onto the image. Contemplating her figures, the artist notes that “I don’t really see them as “characters” in the individual sense, as personalities or people with specific traits. I always things of them as somehow beyond these things. They exist entirely in paint” (quoted in N. Bell and M. Gioni, “Interview with Lynette, Yiadom-Boakye,” in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, ed. T. Ballard, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2016, p. 19).
Layers of oil paint are applied wet-on-wet in the time-honored traditions of the Old Masters. Yiadom-Boakye’s energetic mark-making is a virtuoso exercise in color, her sophisticated underpainting and deep background revealing the sheer exuberance of her talents, her deftly applied brushstrokes loosely constructing her figure into a compelling persona. The artist interrupts her essentially tonal palette with bright shoots of vibrant color, especially in the passages of scarlet red framing the figure’s forearms. Judiciously selected areas of bare primed canvas shine through with a blinding white and become foils, accentuating the composition’s chromatic complexity and emphasizing the many layers of pigment applied across the majority of the canvas, causing the work to sparkle in spite of its overall paired back palette. Yiadom-Boakye works without any disegno—underdrawings which provides a compositional guide—instead painting with pure colors like the Venetians: Titian, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo.
The Quickness achieves an evocative sense of timelessness, exhumed of any notion of contemporaneity of temporality. Yiadom-Boakye depicts her figure in an ambiguous setting and without any markers of time or space, allowing for a full enjoyment of character and emotional charge in this ethereal composition. Noting the powerful emotive energy in these paintings, scholar and poet Elizabeth Alexander writes, “each painting is like looking into a story or an entire life… there are entire lives inside one frame, one poem, entire souls and stories inside the singletons and groups in these paintings” (E. Alexander, “Inside the Order Is Always Something Wild,” in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in Leage with the Night, eds. I. Maidment and A. Schlieker, exh. cat., Tate Britain, London, 2020, p. 89). The figure’s charged gaze imbeds a deep psychological power into the work, which, coupled with the artist’s technical mastery, evokes the spirit of Diego Velázquez, particularly in his portrait of the Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. Yiadom-Boakye is a careful student of art history, her citations of her antecedents visible in her figures’ chosen postures and poses which evidence the multitudes of monographs of Degas, Manet, and others filling her studio. The Quickness is thus simultaneously a part of, and yet confrontational to, the histories of Black subjects in Western portraiture from the first instance of representation in Jan Jansz Mostaert’s Portrait of an African Man (Christophle le More?) from the early sixteenth century to Gustav Klimt’s newly rediscovered portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona.
Yiadom-Boakye is a writer and a poet as well as a painter, and views her artistic practice as writing a poem in paint, drawing out strong and universal emotions, compiling a lifetime of stories into a singular figure. Her titles are allusive as her characters, which Yiadom-Boakye considers simply as “an extra mark in the paintings… I don’t paint about writing or write about paintings. It’s just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about” (Y. Boakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, New Yorker June 19, 2017 p. 52). The Quickness was painted at a critical year for the artist, when she was a finalist for the Turner Price and was presented at the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale—she returned to the biennale in 2019 with a solo show for the first iteration of the Ghana pavilion. She has since reached the highest echelons of contemporary art, holding prestigious solo shows at the Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Basel; the New Museum, New York; and Tate Britian, London. Widely feted, she has achieved many accolades, including the Next Generation Price from the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Carnegie Prize.