What We're Reading

What We're Reading

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night

There are certain painters who just have that magic aura to their paintings when you see them in person. A good Rothko can reveal that to the viewer. A Kerry James Marshall can be as if immersing yourself in a breathtaking novel. British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits have that glow, this unmistakingly special quality that very few painters can capture. She is lauded as one of the most important British painters working today, but the exhibition, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night, showing at the Tate Britain through May 9, 2021, is her first major survey to date and obviously, long overdue. This monograph is a chronicle of this Turner finalist’s career, and the exhibition of 80 works from 2003 to the present will be overwhelmingly sublime and powerful. How she paints is timeless; if you didn’t know where to look in the history books, you would surmise her peers were Manet or Gauguin. She positions her subjects in moments of quiet power and grace, and numerous critics have commented on how she has reimagined classic European portraiture into something fresh. A writer as well, the