.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘[The paintings] give my sense of how I see the world. That’s not to say that it’s right, or accurate, or that it even makes any sense. But I’ve always wanted that to come through somehow’ (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye)
In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s The Trappings (2012), a man stands up from a simple wooden chair and rests a gently clenched hand upon his waist. He looks directly out at the viewer, caught in a moment between movement and repose. Dressed in simple black clothes and gleaming white socks, he emerges from a swirling maelstrom of rich, gestural paint in shimmering hues of maroon, ochre, and cool blue. A superb work from the artist’s celebrated breakout period, The Trappings was first exhibited in Yiadom-Boakye’s important exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2012, for which she received a Turner Prize nomination. 10pm Saturday (2012), a comparable single-figure work shown alongside The Trappings in that exhibition, is now held in the permanent collection of Tate, London. The work was shown again that year as part of the Future Generation Art Prize at the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv—Yiadom-Boakye won the global prize, which recognises young and emerging artists. The exhibition was subsequently staged at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac during the 2013 Venice Biennale, and the work was acquired by the present owner that year. Yiadom-Boakye has since taken her place as one of today’s most celebrated contemporary British artists, mounting a major retrospective at Tate Britain, London in 2022.
Yiadom-Boakye paints quickly, applying thin layers of paint wet on wet without underdrawing. Executed in a single sitting, her canvases display a matte, silky facture; in places, glimpses of raw canvas break through urgent, animated strokes. ‘I think seduction is very important,’ the artist explained to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. ‘I love painting. I love the surface of it’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kaleidoscope, 2012). A writer of prose as well as an artist, Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly realms have a distinctly novelistic quality. Discussing the affinity between painting and writing, she explains: ‘I think with painting there is as much of a language as there is with writing, so for me, a very quick washy mark reads as the same as the shortness of a particular sentence’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye in conversation with A. Sargent, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fictive Figures’, Interview, 15 May 2017). In The Trappings, Yiadom-Boakye’s mastery of gesture is on full display, her deft painterly idiom conjuring with theatrical flair a moment of intimacy between subject and viewer.
Posed against a simple painted backdrop, the figure in The Trappings finds art-historical precedents in the nineteenth-century character studies of Édouard Manet or John Singer Sargent. Yet the subjects of Yiadom-Boakye’s impressionistic, emotionally charged paintings are inhabited by a cast of characters drawn from a vast visual library of found images, memory, literature, and art history. ‘Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me,’ she explains. ‘They are imbued with a power of their own ... I admire them for their strength, their moral fibre’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye quoted in A. Schlieker, ‘Quiet Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’, in Fly In League With The Night, exh. cat. Tate, London 2020, p. 13). The figure in The Trappings, who looks out so convincingly beyond the picture plane, and appears as if he might step out of the painted space of the canvas into the world of the viewer, is made of paint and not flesh, conjured merely from the artist’s imagination.
The title of The Trappings suggests misplaced desire, but also misdirection and false facades. Dressed entirely in black, the subject of Yiadom-Boakye’s painting might allude to the passage from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the protagonist describes the ritual or artificial presentation of grief—the ‘customary suits of solemn black’—as ‘the trappings and the suits of woe,’ a pale imitation of the true weight of his feeling. The painted veneer of the canvas, like the stage of a theatre, is revealed to be a place of artifice and unreality. Drawing on powerful storytelling traditions and masterful command of paint, in The Trappings Yiadom-Boakye weaves narrative from illusion, conjuring a pliable space in which time and place are manipulated and unmoored.
In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s The Trappings (2012), a man stands up from a simple wooden chair and rests a gently clenched hand upon his waist. He looks directly out at the viewer, caught in a moment between movement and repose. Dressed in simple black clothes and gleaming white socks, he emerges from a swirling maelstrom of rich, gestural paint in shimmering hues of maroon, ochre, and cool blue. A superb work from the artist’s celebrated breakout period, The Trappings was first exhibited in Yiadom-Boakye’s important exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2012, for which she received a Turner Prize nomination. 10pm Saturday (2012), a comparable single-figure work shown alongside The Trappings in that exhibition, is now held in the permanent collection of Tate, London. The work was shown again that year as part of the Future Generation Art Prize at the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv—Yiadom-Boakye won the global prize, which recognises young and emerging artists. The exhibition was subsequently staged at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac during the 2013 Venice Biennale, and the work was acquired by the present owner that year. Yiadom-Boakye has since taken her place as one of today’s most celebrated contemporary British artists, mounting a major retrospective at Tate Britain, London in 2022.
Yiadom-Boakye paints quickly, applying thin layers of paint wet on wet without underdrawing. Executed in a single sitting, her canvases display a matte, silky facture; in places, glimpses of raw canvas break through urgent, animated strokes. ‘I think seduction is very important,’ the artist explained to curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. ‘I love painting. I love the surface of it’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kaleidoscope, 2012). A writer of prose as well as an artist, Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly realms have a distinctly novelistic quality. Discussing the affinity between painting and writing, she explains: ‘I think with painting there is as much of a language as there is with writing, so for me, a very quick washy mark reads as the same as the shortness of a particular sentence’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye in conversation with A. Sargent, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fictive Figures’, Interview, 15 May 2017). In The Trappings, Yiadom-Boakye’s mastery of gesture is on full display, her deft painterly idiom conjuring with theatrical flair a moment of intimacy between subject and viewer.
Posed against a simple painted backdrop, the figure in The Trappings finds art-historical precedents in the nineteenth-century character studies of Édouard Manet or John Singer Sargent. Yet the subjects of Yiadom-Boakye’s impressionistic, emotionally charged paintings are inhabited by a cast of characters drawn from a vast visual library of found images, memory, literature, and art history. ‘Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me,’ she explains. ‘They are imbued with a power of their own ... I admire them for their strength, their moral fibre’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye quoted in A. Schlieker, ‘Quiet Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’, in Fly In League With The Night, exh. cat. Tate, London 2020, p. 13). The figure in The Trappings, who looks out so convincingly beyond the picture plane, and appears as if he might step out of the painted space of the canvas into the world of the viewer, is made of paint and not flesh, conjured merely from the artist’s imagination.
The title of The Trappings suggests misplaced desire, but also misdirection and false facades. Dressed entirely in black, the subject of Yiadom-Boakye’s painting might allude to the passage from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the protagonist describes the ritual or artificial presentation of grief—the ‘customary suits of solemn black’—as ‘the trappings and the suits of woe,’ a pale imitation of the true weight of his feeling. The painted veneer of the canvas, like the stage of a theatre, is revealed to be a place of artifice and unreality. Drawing on powerful storytelling traditions and masterful command of paint, in The Trappings Yiadom-Boakye weaves narrative from illusion, conjuring a pliable space in which time and place are manipulated and unmoored.