Powerful and beguiling, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s A Political Shirt is a par exemplar of the artist’s signature mode of enigmatic and captivating portraiture; a celebrated oeuvre preoccupied with examining the complexity of human nature through subjects conjured from the artist’s imagination and mediated onto the canvas through her vital creative process. Executed in 2010, the present work is a heady concoction of art-historical allusion and elegant forms, fully realising the potential for figuration to communicate notions of interiority and thought.

Exemplifying Yiadom-Boakye’s focus on nuances of the cerebral, the subject of A Political Shirt is seemingly meditative, wrapped within his own train of thought. His gaze, punctuated by dark and piercing pupils,lead us beyond the edge of the canvas—upon a subject inaccessible to the viewer before him. Despite his mysterious anonymity, Yiadom-Boakye finds ways to imbue her imaginary sitter with a sense of identity through the visual cues of posture, expression, fashion and indeed the title of the work. Describings the artist’s project in terms highly reminiscent of the present work, acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith reflects: “Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes.” (Zadie Smith, “Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits,” The New Yorker, 12 June 2017). Presenting a subject that is at once unknowable and subconsciously familiar, A Political Shirt endlessly engages the imagination, acting as a generative source for narrative, association and speculation.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with the Night

An exceptionally elegant example from her celebrated body of work, A Political Shirt invites and denies access, occupying the border between the established canon and a productive unknown. Although trained to paint from live models, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are pulled from her imagination, each a conflation of experiences, memories, and art history. The artist describes her paintings as, “suggestions of people...They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” This lack of a fixed narrative invites viewers to project their own interpretations, thus raising important questions of identity and representation

With an uncanny ability to forge narrative and mood in her painting, Yiadom-Boakye’s evocative works have resulted in critical acclaim on the global stage. A finalist for the Turner Prize and subsequently representing Ghana in the 2019 Venice Biennale; the artist will continue to be honored with a major survey of her works at the Tate Britain in November 2022, a monographic exhibition which was sadly cut short by lockdown. This exhibition is currently touring internationally before coming back to be restaged at Tate Britain for a full three-month run.