Hayward Gallery Touring presents To Improvise a Mountain curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Now open at Leeds Art Gallery, Hayward Gallery Touring presents To Improvise A Mountain, an exhibition curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, one of the foremost painters working today. For this exhibition, Yiadom-Boakye selects works that have been critical to her way of seeing and thinking, inviting audiences around the UK on a personal journey across different geographies and generations of artists.

First coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Yiadom-Boakye is an artist and a writer who is renowned for her oil paintings of imagined subjects. Assertive presences who yet seem to exist outside of any definable time or place, her figures are hailed for both their technical mastery and
lingering, enigmatic quality.

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 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 similar to the act of painting.