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Lot Essay
‘It isn’t so much about placing anyone in the canon as it is about saying that we’ve always been here, we’ve always existed, self-sufficient, pre- and post-discovery, and in no way defined by who sees us’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye)
Held in the same private collection since the year it was made, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Three Kings (2005) encapsulates a moment of encounter. The protagonist of the painting looks fixedly at the beholder. She is attired in simple dark clothing, enlivened by a cerulean bead bracelet and two earrings of the same hue. While most of the composition is rendered in shimmering, shadowy waves of paint, her face is a mask-like visage of bold impasto strokes. Her expression is ambiguous, welcoming hospitality mingled with surprise. She places her left hand to her chest as if in astonishment, while her right hand holds onto a partially-visible curtain, or perhaps a fluted column, as if steadying herself. Yiadom-Boakye graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003. Four years later writer and curator Ekow Eshun chose her as an artist to watch. She has since exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2019) and her work has entered major museum collections. In 2020, she became the first Black British woman artist to have a monographic exhibition at Tate Britain, London.
In Three Kings, the setting is suggestive of the theatre, a world of make-believe detached from mundane reality. It evokes the heavy textile dividers of Dutch Golden Age paintings such as Nicolaes Maes’ 1650s ‘eavesdropper’ series and the sumptuous scarlet curtain in John Singer Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), a painting that Yiadom-Boakye has repeatedly referenced. The artist exclusively paints black protagonists, but her project is not simply to insert them into the Western canon. As Aurella Yussuf writes, ‘The true radical nature of the work lies in the figures’ quiet resistance to the audience’s gaze and expectations of Black subjects’ (A. Yussuf, ‘The Quiet Radicalism of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Tate Britain Show’, Frieze, 21 Jan 2021).
Yiadom-Boakye is a masterful painter of darkness and light, drawing on the Renaissance technique of chiaroscuro as perfected by Caravaggio in the late 16th century. Three Kings’ tenebrous room is distinguished by dappled patches of illumination. The painting’s title itself summons up the spectre of art history, evoking the trio of magi who visited the infant Jesus: is this a modern-day Mary? Although her paintings have a veneer of verisimilitude, Yiadom-Boakye’s figures are purely imaginary. The world they inhabit seems to exist outside any single historical moment. She is a writer as well as a painter, and author Zadie Smith has compared her subjects to fictional characters. Yet she also avoids obvious narrative. ‘Yiadom-Boakye’, writes Andrea Schlieker, ‘wants to capture the evanescence of a mood, not burden us with narrative detail.’ (A. Schlieker ‘Quiet Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’, in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night, exh. cat. Tate, London 2020, p. 9). Three Kings is a richly suggestive spur for the imagination.
Held in the same private collection since the year it was made, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Three Kings (2005) encapsulates a moment of encounter. The protagonist of the painting looks fixedly at the beholder. She is attired in simple dark clothing, enlivened by a cerulean bead bracelet and two earrings of the same hue. While most of the composition is rendered in shimmering, shadowy waves of paint, her face is a mask-like visage of bold impasto strokes. Her expression is ambiguous, welcoming hospitality mingled with surprise. She places her left hand to her chest as if in astonishment, while her right hand holds onto a partially-visible curtain, or perhaps a fluted column, as if steadying herself. Yiadom-Boakye graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003. Four years later writer and curator Ekow Eshun chose her as an artist to watch. She has since exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2019) and her work has entered major museum collections. In 2020, she became the first Black British woman artist to have a monographic exhibition at Tate Britain, London.
In Three Kings, the setting is suggestive of the theatre, a world of make-believe detached from mundane reality. It evokes the heavy textile dividers of Dutch Golden Age paintings such as Nicolaes Maes’ 1650s ‘eavesdropper’ series and the sumptuous scarlet curtain in John Singer Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), a painting that Yiadom-Boakye has repeatedly referenced. The artist exclusively paints black protagonists, but her project is not simply to insert them into the Western canon. As Aurella Yussuf writes, ‘The true radical nature of the work lies in the figures’ quiet resistance to the audience’s gaze and expectations of Black subjects’ (A. Yussuf, ‘The Quiet Radicalism of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Tate Britain Show’, Frieze, 21 Jan 2021).
Yiadom-Boakye is a masterful painter of darkness and light, drawing on the Renaissance technique of chiaroscuro as perfected by Caravaggio in the late 16th century. Three Kings’ tenebrous room is distinguished by dappled patches of illumination. The painting’s title itself summons up the spectre of art history, evoking the trio of magi who visited the infant Jesus: is this a modern-day Mary? Although her paintings have a veneer of verisimilitude, Yiadom-Boakye’s figures are purely imaginary. The world they inhabit seems to exist outside any single historical moment. She is a writer as well as a painter, and author Zadie Smith has compared her subjects to fictional characters. Yet she also avoids obvious narrative. ‘Yiadom-Boakye’, writes Andrea Schlieker, ‘wants to capture the evanescence of a mood, not burden us with narrative detail.’ (A. Schlieker ‘Quiet Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’, in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night, exh. cat. Tate, London 2020, p. 9). Three Kings is a richly suggestive spur for the imagination.