Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Lie to Me (2019)

Overview

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s large-scale paintings of ‘imagined scenarios’, bodies and tales seek to capture a single moment or stream of consciousness. In a 2010 interview with Nadine Rubin Nathan in the New York Times Magazine, Yiadom-Boakye described her compositions as ‘suggestions of people...They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.’

Lie to Me (2019) featured in Unsettled Objects is a diptych which foregrounds a man and a woman, both dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, who seem to occupy a similar psychological space. Although the two figures face one another, each appears either unaware of the other’s presence or secure in the knowledge that the other is close at hand. The diptych continues Yiadom-Boakye’s dialogue with the formal and conceptual concerns she considered during her presentation in Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015).