Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is world-renowned for her paintings of Black figures, drawing on her own experiences as a Black British artist and her Ghanaian heritage. Her figures are sometimes portrayed alone, sharing an intense, direct stare with the viewer, and sometimes in groups engrossed in their own activities.

Her figures are entirely imagined, but are drawn from photos and scrapbooks rather than pulled entirely from the artist’s imagination. The timeframe her figures exist in is kept ambiguous to retain a sense of universality. In a 2012 interview, Yiadom-Boakye said, “People ask me, ‘Who are they, where are they?’ What they should be asking is ‘what’ are they?”

She says that she is as much a writer as she is a painter, which is evidenced in her poetic titles. In a video interview with Tate ahead of the opening of her 2022 retrospective “Fly in League with the Wind,” Yiadom-Boakye said, “Titling, for me, became something like an extra mark. It’s part of the work. It’s not an explanation of it. So I can never exactly explain the title, because it’s like explaining a brushmark.” Similarly, the artist told the museum in a written interview ahead of the exhibition that “I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.”

Yiadom-Boakye’s career went from strength to strength in the 2010s, starting with a major career milestone in 2013 when she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize (won that year by Laure Prouvost). In 2017 Artnet News predicted that Yiadom-Boakye was one of the contemporary artists who would “transform the art world”, and in 2018 she was one of a string of artists of color making dramatic auction debuts.

Yiadom-Boakye was the number one most bankable ultra-contemporary artist (artists born after 1974) in Artnet’s Intelligence Report Mid-Year Review 2024, with a 100% sell-through rate across seven lots at auction and a total of $7.7 million in sales. The artist ranked third in our list of ultra-contemporary artists with the best-selling individual works thanks to the nearly $3 million sale of Black Allegiance to the Cunning (2018) at Christie’s New York on May 14. This result was $650,000 off the record she had set the previous year, but $1 million more than her next-highest sale.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Diplomacy III (2009). Courtesy Susan Barrett and Faye Fleming & Partner, Geneva.

Key details: Born in 1977 in London, where she still lives.

Galleries representing: Corvi-Mora, London, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Her first solo show in the U.S., “Essays and Documents,” was held at Shainman in 2010. Her most recent appearance at the gallery was part of the group show “We Buy Gold” in 2023, along with Charisse Pearlina Weston and Kerry James Marshall. Yiadom-Boakye has had three solo shows with Corvi-Mora, in 2011, 2013, and 2016.

Breakout Moment: Yiadom-Boakye had a major show at London’s Tate Britain in 2022–2023. “Fly in League with the Wind” cemented Yiadom-Boakye’s reputation as a museum-grade artist. The exhibition was a collaboration between Tate Britain, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg), and it toured internationally ahead of its London run.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Culmination (2016), Alle Werke Courtesy die Künstlerin; Corvi-Mora, London, und Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / All works courtesy the artist; Corvi-Mora, London, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Auction record: Yiadom-Boakye’s Six Birds in the Bush (2015) sold for £3 million ($3.6 million) at Sotheby’s London’s The Now evening auction in October 2023. This result far surpassed its high estimate of £1.8 million ($2.3 million) and came to almost $2 million more than her previous record, for Diplomacy III (2009), which sold at Christie’s New York’s 21st-century evening sale in May 2021, for $2 million.

Key Quote: “I’ve never distinguished my politics from my life. It’s in the fabric of what I’m doing. I make the work that I want to make, regardless of who has made it their life’s work to hate me. That’s a ridiculous starting point to have for a career or for a practice.” (Tate, 2022)

“Crib Notes” is a quick-read dossier focused on the artists who ranked on our best-sellers list for ultra-contemporary art in our 2024 Mid-Year Intelligence Report.