Similar to a novelist, Yiadom-Boakye creates characters that have lively back stories; yet she leaves it up to the viewer’s imagination to fill in the details of these fictional lives. She works quickly, embracing the physicality and technicality of painting, and often destroys unsuccessful work. Yiadom-Boakye is strongly influenced by language, having written various fiction, poetry, and essays. “When I write, it’s normally something that I can’t paint. I paint what I can’t write. So, most of the paintings are sort of a narrative that isn’t clear but a combination of found images, imagination, and drawing,” she says.

Born in 1977 in London to Ghanaian parents, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye showed an early interest in painting. During her years of study in art, she realized that she wanted not only to paint portraits of real people but to let her painting create imaginary people. She has had many important solo museum shows and her work is included in many institutional collections. She was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 2018 and was the 2012 recipient of the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize. She was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2013.