British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is world-renowned for her masterful large-scale canvases that imbue her subjects with a unique kind of magic. Six Birds in the Bush is a supreme example of the artist’s technical skill with paint and control over psychological complexity. It portrays a man who absentmindedly directs his gaze towards the public, as if interrupted in his thoughts. Full of charisma and a real, tangible personality, he wears clothes unattributable to a specific t.mes and place. Indeed, Boakye’s figures are unplaceable in t.mes and place and act as touchstones for personal reflections and individual ideas. This work very clearly and powerful encapsulates the artist’s historicising impulse in that sense, as the subject is both highly contemporary and yet seems to emerge from a history book. In the painting, the viewer is attracted by the playful assonance of some colours of the backgrounds that can be traced forward to the subject’s clothing: the blue and the greens move from the blurry plane behind the portrait and the reflections on the white shirt and the hat’s feather.

“Suggestion is the dream” claimed French poet Stephane Mallarmé, identifying suggestion as a portal to another world and another dimension linked to poetry in the same way history is linked to prose. For the artist, who is also a writer, her titles are an integral part of the work and constitute another brushstroke, another splash of colour. As the artist has poignantly noted: “I write about the things I can't paint and paint the things I can't write about” (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, “An Introduction to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” Tate website, November 2022). Through the choice of portraiture as her main mode of expression, the artist situates herself in a highly traditional genre that bears much art historical weight and implication. Much of her originality is to be found precisely in the approach that she takes, images dedicated to black subjects, inscribed in the more limited history of black people painted by black artists.

Yiadom-Boakye renders the complexity of humanity in the simplest way possible. Visually layered yet beguilingly flat, her faces render the complexity of humanity in a highly refined and intricate manner. She does not, however, veil the artistic difficulties inherent to her particular brand of quiet, sensual realism, but rather demands an intense kind of slow looking from every viewer in the tradition of artists such as Manet and Degas.

In many ways, the artist is concerned with neither subject nor genre but rather the act of painting itself and its possibilities. She tends to work quickly, producing one work a day: everything else is subordinate to pictorial investigation. The interest in the painted medium is, as anticipated, underlined by the limitation the artist imposes on herself by choosing to only create naturalistic portraits of black subjects. This unusual choice, which lends itself to a limited palette and a simple, confident brushstroke, further focusses the artist's production on working through slight variations in glazing, composition and pigmentation. This mode of working aligns the artist and her (self-)historicising practice closer to that of Modernist artists such as Cézanne, Morandi or Monet who, through intense repetition of similar subjects in series, not only developed distinctive, influential personal styles, but also asserted the artist’s presence on a more fundamental level.

In Six Birds in the Bush simplicity means breaking the limits of the eye through the artist’s precisely impressionistic brushwork. There is a dreamlike realism emanating from the canvas; the subject's identity is both clear yet oblique, as if seen through the haze of fading memories. Yiadom-Boakye views the human head as the portal to one’s soul and her best works, such as Six Birds in the Bush, feature the subject gazing directly out of the canvas. Fixed in place, the viewer is suddenly aware of their transience; the people in Yiadom-Boakye’s universe have no such fears. In recent years, Yiadom-Boakye has taken her rightful place as one of the most respected contemporary artists currently working, shortlisted in 2013 for the Turner Prize and omnipresent protagonist in Fly in League With the Night, her first solo exhibition at Tate Britain. Exhibited in this highly acclaimed show, the present work integrates many key aspects of her oeuvre: tremoring between contemporary and classical, it holds up a mirror to society and its actors and forms a breathtakingly beautiful ode to painting.