To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates

This Summer, we are pleased to present To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates, a Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from Southbank Centre, London curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Yiadom-Boakye is an artist and writer, one of the foremost painters of her generation renowned for her oil paintings of imagined people. These figures feel confident and seem to exist outside of any specific time or place, the people in her paintings are admired for both their technical mastery and lingering, mysterious quality.

For this exhibition, Yiadom-Boakye selects works that have been critical to her way of seeing and thinking as an artist, inviting people to take a personal journey through art from different places and different generations. The exhibition represents an opportunity for audiences to share in Yiadom-Boakye’s unique vision of the world and understand her journey as an artist in the iconic De La Warr Pavilion galleries.

Developed by the artist in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring, To Improvise A Mountain brings Yiadom-Boakye’s work into conversation with a range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process. The exhibition includes works by Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard, David Wojnarowicz, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

The spirit of the exhibition stems from a fragment of poetry in ‘Inamorata’, a 1970 recording by jazz musician Miles Davis: ‘Who is this music that which description may never justify? / Can the ocean be described?’ For Yiadom-Boakye, poetry’s ability to translate the intangible into images, and to think through rhythm and feeling, is much like the act of painting itself.

This exhibition presented across both gallery spaces invites audiences on a journey of encounters with artworks that create emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder. For Yiadom-Boakye, ‘the governing principle, the dialogue between the works, is that spirit of infinite knowledge and infinite knowing that poetry allows us’.

Presented at De La Warr Pavilion as part of a UK tour. To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates is a Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from Southbank Centre, London, curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, presented at De La Warr Pavilion.