Bark Scraper

Property from an Important Private Collection

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE (B. 1977)

Bark Scraper

initialed twice and titled 'LYB LYB Bark Scraper' (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

59 1/8 x 51 1/4 inches (150.2 x 130.2 cm)

Painted in 2013.

PROVENANCE:

Corvi-Mora Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2014

EXHIBITED:

Kiev, Pinchuk Art Centre, Versus, solo Exhibition of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the winner of the Main Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize 2012, November 2013-January 2014.

NOTES:

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in London in 1977, where she continues to live and work. She is celebrated for her evocative portraits of fictional characters whom she imagines from her experiences or impressions of people, places, photographs and objects. Each of her characters is portrayed in dark, muted colors, adding to the ambiguity and introspective quality of her portraits. While some of her figures are depicted in action, there is always a certain quality of stillness about them, as if the character is not bound by time. In this way, Yiadom-Boakye invites her viewers to project their own experiences onto her characters, allowing them to take form within endless narratives.

In Bark Scraper, Yiadom-Boakye presents a solitary figure whose quiet intensity is heightened by the painting’s shadowy, undefined background. His seated posture is relaxed, but alert, his eyes both introspective, as though engaged in deep thought or quiet observation, and also focused, as if he knows he is both the observer and the observed. The environment gives no clear indication of time or place, reinforcing the timeless, imagined nature of the artist’s subjects. As with much of her work, this absence of narrative context centers the viewer’s attention on the emotional presence of the figure rather than on superfluous detail.

Yiadom-Boakye’s work nods to traditional formal portrait considerations such as line, color, and scale, but also challenges the conventions of representation in Western art. In Bark Scraper, as in many of her paintings, the figure exists without overt explanation or spectacle. There is no performance or symbolic framing, simply the quiet dignity of the person imagined into being. Bark Scraper gives the character agency, undoubtedly imbuing the figure with an aura of complexity whose existence or importance does not need justification from narrative. The result is both radical and deeply human. 

Her expressive brushstroke and restrained color palette give the painting a sense of immediacy, as if the figure is emerging from the artist’s memory in real time. The blurred edges and loose, confident strokes suggest movement, presence and impermanence. Upon first glance, the figure’s deep green clothes nearly blend into the background, reflecting how Yiadom-Boakye builds her subjects from fleeting thoughts and sensations. Bark Scraper is a portrait not meant to be solved or bound to one narrative, but rather it is meant to be universally felt. It invites all viewers into a contemplative space where the presence of the work itself becomes a profound and poetic subject.

Yiadom-Boakye is included in numerous institutional collections, including Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Gallery Museum of Southern Australia, Adelaide; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Dallas Museum of Art; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.