To Improvise a Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates

Lynette Yiadom-BoakyeTo Improvise a Mountain 2024. Charcoal and conte on paper, variable dimensions (unfinished). Courtesy the Artist, Corvi-Mora, London and Jack Shainman, New York

‘The decisions are governed by something I can’t really put into words. I’ve selected things that I love by dint of their poetry, their beauty, their refusal, their internal logic and, above all, their power.

Whether through images, objects or actual text, each artist here invents the language they need and there is magic in it.’

Yiadom-Boakye, the Turner Prize-nominated painter of imaginary figures, curates a show of artists who have influenced her work. These include historical figures such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Walter Sickert, as well as contemporaries Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola and The Otolith Group.

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?’ Dive in at dlwp.com