The figures in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits are all fictions, conjured from a scrapbook of memories. Each one is completed in a single day, because, as she puts it: ‘Coming back to a work never improves it’.
The paintings are carefully ambiguous – clothing is generic, the setting is hard to discern and even the gender of the subjects is uncertain. On the eve of the 2013 Turner Prize exhibition, for which she is a nominee, TateShots visited her at her studio in London’s Bethnal Green.
