‘To the last’ (2013) is one of the three works of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in the collection of MoMA
Lynette about her work:
The Myriad Motives of Men, 2014 (collection MoMA)
Critically recognized for her moody-hued paintings of people who sprout from her imagination (above), the British artist says the challenge is a good thing. “I paint because I love doing it and because I never stop finding it difficult,” she told Frieze magazine. “I always feel like I’m trying to get to somewhere that I’ll never reach. That’s the way it should feel or else there’d be no point. I’ll keep trying to do it better, or more successfully, according to what I want from it. I’m rarely completely satisfied but that makes me more determined to carry on.”
Where it had been, 2013 (collection MoMA)
“I think of painting as the means through which I present the world as I see or think or feel it: a combination of real and unreal. The fantasies, nonsenses and random associations in my head meld with the life I live and the things that happen around me. …For me, the term ‘figurative painter’ is a more accurate description than ‘portrait painter’.”
Treasure, 2013.
“Politics plays a large role in my work, but often less in terms of subject than object, the fact of doing what you’re doing. How pretty can you afford to be? How ugly should you be? Should the pleasure ever be all yours? How ashamed are you? And who still has a good enough reason to paint? Politics of some shape or another underpin most work regardless of medium, but when one depicts the figure the questions raised will always be political.” (quotes from Frieze Magazine, February 2015)
Place to live, 2013.
Courtesy: Jack Shainman, New York.