Lynette Yiadom-Boakye presentsTo Improvise a Mountain: Curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a touring exhibition of a selection of works critical to her way of seeing and thinking, inviting audiences on a personal journey through art past and present.
Featured artists include: Samuel Fosso, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, among others. Yiadom-Boakye first came to prominence in the early 2010s as both an artist and a writer who is today renowned for her oil paintings of imagined subjects. Her figures are assertive in their presences and seem to exist outside of time or place, this is both in their technical mastery and lingering as well as their enigmatic quality.
To Improvise a Mountain is developed by the artist in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring, Leeds Art Gallery, MK Gallery and Nottingham Castle. Through this exhibition, Yiadom-Boakye brings her curated work into conversation with an eclectic range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process as a curator. The exhibition’s curatorial spirit stems from a fragment of poetry within Miles Dabid’s Inamorata (1971), which asks: 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 the mind can hold, and to think through rhythm and feeling, is similar to the act of painting.
Yiadom-Boakye had this to say: “My deployment of words in writing is not always so different to my use of brush marks in painting. The logic, patterns, relationships, repetitions and decisions are guided by intuition — the rightness and wrongness, the blatancies and subtleties — and that’s how I want to approach this show.” To Improvise a Mountain offers a deeply personal interweaving of artworks that create their own emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism and wonder. Ranging from the visceral Post-Impressionism of painter Walter Sickert to the video essays of The Otolith Group, for Yiadom-Boakye “the governing principle, the dialogue between the works in the show, is that spirit of infinite knowledge and infinite knowing that poetry allows us.”
To Improvise a Mountain: Curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye opened on the 16th of May and will run until the 5th of October 2025 at Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds. It will then open on the 25th of October 2025 and will run until the 8th of February 2026 at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. The last round will open on the 20th of March and will run until the 21st of June 2026 at Nottingham Castle, Nottingham.
