Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: The Fiction of the Soul

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977, London) is a painter of ghosts. Her subjects are not real people; they are “composites” of memories, drawings, and found images. She works with a muted, earthy palette—greens, browns, and deep blues—and often completes a painting in a single day to maintain its emotional urgency. Her figures are usually depicted in timeless, non-specific locations, often staring directly at the viewer or engaged in mysterious, quiet actions.

By stripping away the “props” of the real world—phones, modern clothes, specific landmarks—she forces the viewer to engage with the humanity of the Black figure rather than their social status. Her work is often accompanied by poetic, enigmatic titles that read like lines from a forgotten novel.

The Impact: Yiadom-Boakye has “liberated” Black figure painting in the United Kingdom. She showed that Blackness in art does not always have to be about trauma, politics, or history—it can simply be about the quiet, fictional existence of a human soul. Her major retrospective at Tate Britain solidified her place as one of the most important painters of the 21st century.