Born in London and of Ghanaian descent, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has achieved widespread acclaim for her open-ended figurative paintings depicting a cast of fictitious personae, and brimming with sly allusions to more traditional styles of portraiture. She has described her paintings as being like ‘paragraphs or sentences’, explaining that ‘I don’t want to fix a particular narrative behind the work but to instead leave behind a suggestion of one.’ In 2013 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Aside from her work as a practitioner, Yiadom-Boakye is a visiting lecturer at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford.
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