Doctorate

Included in the 2008 group exhibition Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the 7th Gwangju Biennale, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Doctorate (2007) is a striking, poignant portrait rendered in the artist’s distinctive nocturnal palette. The brushwork is gestural, the paint thickly applied; Yiadom-Boakye is known for completing her paintings quickly, which allows for an immediacy to be worked directly into the pigment. Influenced by painters such as Édouard Manet and Franciso Goya, Yiadom-Boakye’s practice relies upon traditional techniques as a means of celebrating black subjectivity. Instead of portraying historical figures or famous faces, she instead paints fictional creations born from her mind and inspired by newspaper photographs, snapshots, and sketches. Her paintings put forth a new history of representation, and by recuperating a traditionally exclusionary genre, Yiadom-Boakye dismantles the canon. Her solo exhibition Fly in the League with the Night is currently on view at Tate Britain; it will then travel to Moderna Museet, Stockholm, K20, Dusseldorf, Germany, and MUDAM Luxembourg.