No Need of Speech by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

At first glance, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s timeless paintings seem to recall the classic style of portraitists who have come before her. And so, one might assume that her subjects, a predominantly Black cast of characters, sit for days as she studies their faces, gestures—their very souls. But the people who populate her world don’t exist in ours. They are manifestations of the British-Ghanaian artist’s imagination, composites of images found in scrapbooks and magazines, and hinted at in her own writings. The creation of each large oil-on-linen canvas usually begins and ends in one exhaustive eight-hour session. Yet despite that sense of immediacy, the paintings purposefully betray no sense of time or place. In 2018, she created 13 new works for that year’s Carnegie International—including No Need of Speech, now part of the museum’s collection—earning her the prestigious Carnegie Prize.