Four women with blue-tinted hair, seen from the back, chat while mostly ignoring a gold-framed landscape painting on the wall. A man carves an oddly animate roast pig at a dining table, with rows of dried fish hanging in the background. Two women sit, unspeaking, at a table out of a Manet still life, strewed with oranges and dishes. Men, rendered life size in charcoal, stand straight-backed and silent dressed in Ghanaian mourning robes.<\/p>\n
These are some of the characters to be found in \u201cMany a Moonlight Caveat<\/a>,\u201d an enigmatic and at times delightfully unruly exhibition of 46 new works by the British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. They hover between representation and something more conceptual, demonstrating what one observer, the painter Jennifer Packer, described to me as \u201cthe experience of painting as an alchemical process.\u201d<\/p>\n On view at both locations of the Jack Shainman Gallery, it is Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s first major showing in New York since 2019, after solo exhibitions at the Tate Britain in 2021-22<\/a> and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2023<\/a>. It includes paintings, for which she is best known \u2014 figures captured in mid-action or mid-thought, alone and in groups \u2014 as well as, surprisingly, a large number of charcoal and sanguine drawings.<\/p>\n Who are these people? Though they may seem at first glance to be portraits, the images are not drawn from life. The painter conjures them, aided by a scrapbook of family and found photographs, snapshots she takes herself, postcards of famous paintings, and magazine clippings. Andrea Schlieker, former director of exhibitions at the Tate, has described Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s method of envisioning her subjects \u201clike a writer builds a character in a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n As the artist said in an interview Shainman\u2019s Lower Manhattan gallery, \u201cIt allows me to build a language that lets the paint to do the talking. My method is low-tech, a bit chaotic and impractical, but it feels right for me,\u201d The artist is a warm presence, quick to laugh, and speaks about her work with a thoughtful precision.<\/p>\n Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s approach lends her work a theatrical quality, especially in drawings like one of a male dancer caught mid-performance, his hands and feet rendered with such specificity that it\u2019s hard to imagine he wasn\u2019t drawn from life. He is called \u201cRed-Capped Manakin,\u201d the name of a bird; the avian reference is echoed in the feathered ruff around his neck. In the four-part work \u201cKeep Me Coming, Stop You Going,\u201d four nearly identical figures emerge through red velvet curtains, as if on a stage.<\/p>\n Instead of an artist\u2019s statement there is a poem by Yiadom-Boakye. (The painter is also a poet and short-story writer; \u201cI write about the things I can\u2019t paint and paint the things I can\u2019t write about,\u201d she often says.) Here again we have birds \u2014 barn owl, night jar, corncrake, woodcock \u2014 who explain, in turn, that succumbing to the lures of the world and its temptations, or seeing oneself through its eyes, is to be consumed by it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Nightingale Knows That To Be Unseen,\/Is Ofttimes to Be Truly Free,\u201d Yiadom-Boakye writes.<\/p>\n Remaining unseen has become increasingly difficult \u2014 yet increasingly important \u2014 for the artist. She came to prominence in the United States after a 2010-11 solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem<\/a>. Her works have been collected by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate. \u201cShoot the Desperate, Hug the Needy\u201d (2010), highlighting two jubilant women in white, sold this week at Christie\u2019s for $825,000, while her record was set in 2023 \u2014 $3.6 million for a 2015 painting, \u201cSix Birds in the Bush<\/a>,\u201d at Sotheby\u2019s London, a portrait of a fictional man gazing at the viewer in a setting that is timeless and ambiguous. As her fame has increased, she rarely does interviews and avoids having her photograph appear in articles alongside her work.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not an affectation,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just that it\u2019s so much more freeing. You want to feel that endless possibility without having to worry about putting into words what\u2019s meant to be communicated by painting.\u201d<\/p>\n Yiadom-Boakye\u2019s compositions don\u2019t court specific narratives. You get the feeling, for example, that the shirtless man in \u201cThe Diligent Crest of Midday\u201d standing in front of a mirror, being photographed by a barefoot man seen in reflection, was composed primarily because of the opportunity to paint variations on the blue and white checkered floor tiles \u2014 a signature motif in her work, and a nod to Vermeer\u2019s interiors. But the hands of the clock in the background point to 12, a hint at a potential symbolic reading too.<\/p>\n The men in \u201cThe Unbending Amaranthine\u201d talk to each other, except for a white-haired character who gazes out of the picture inscrutably. Each one\u2019s hands are held in a distinct fashion, recalling the care August Rodin took in his sculptural group \u201cThe Burghers of Calais.\u201d Their feet dissolve into a lush flurry of brushstrokes, melding with the grass on which they stand, and the picture is painted on a herringbone-woven canvas, whose toothy texture never allows the paint to settle into a crisp outline. The recumbent male figures in \u201cThree Yesses Closer to a No,\u201d rendered in a red-brown iron-oxide chalk favored by the old masters, seem relaxed and alert at once.<\/p>\n \u201cWhenever I look at Lynette\u2019s work, there\u2019s action happening,\u201d said the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola<\/a>, who specializes in intricate drawings of Black figures. \u201cPeople are doing things. They\u2019re not just being seen. They\u2019re not just being consumed. They\u2019re in their own worlds. They\u2019re creating things. But whatever they\u2019re doing, none of it is for us. It\u2019s for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n