Lynette Yiadom-Boakye calls her works "figurative paintings" instead of "portraits" and emphasizes that they are not meant to be likenesses of specific people. Rather, they originate largely from her imagination as well as a range of collected source material and visual observations. Yet despite their fictional foundations—in fact, perhaps because of them—the figures have the potential to transcend the everyday. As Yiadom-Boakye has said, "Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me. They are imbued with a power of their own; they have a resonance—something emphatic and other-worldly." Her painting The Myriad Motives of Men, for example, portrays two seated black men against a spare background and is rendered in a reduced color palette, preventing the viewer from locating the subjects in a particular time or place.

Gallery label from

Unfinished Conversations, March 19-July 30, 2017.

Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 71 x 51 1/4" (180.3 x 130.2 cm)
Credit Gift of Dian Woodner in honor of The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art
Object number 1070.2014
Department Painting & Sculpture

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

British, born 1977 27 works online

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases showcase complex palettes that luxuriate, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, in shades of brown. The subject matter is central: Yiadom-Boakye paints brown-skinned figures, both men and women, typically situated against backgrounds that barely hint at being anyplace at all.

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