To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates
De La Warr Pavilion have secured To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates, as part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring programme. Yiadom-Boakye is one of the UK’s foremost contemporary painters. For this exhibition she has selected works critical to her way of seeing and thinking, inviting audiences to share a personal journey across different geographies and generations of artists.
Yiadom-Boakye is renowned for oil paintings of imagined subjects: assertive presences who seem to exist outside of any definable time or place. Her figures are hailed for both their technical mastery and their lingering, enigmatic quality. To Improvise A Mountain brings her own work into conversation with a range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process.
The inspiration for the exhibition is a fragment of poetry in Inamorata, part of the Cellar Door Sessions by the Miles Davis sextet, read by actor Conrad Roberts on Davis’ Live-Evil, innovative for both frantic, brilliant jazz/rock and ditto artwork: ‘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 akin to the act of painting.
The exhibition finds a resonance at De La Warr Pavilion, in the bold, open architecture at the edge of the land, implying boundless cultural possibilities. It’s an ideal setting for an exhibition that reaches across geographies, generations and forms.
Boakye says: “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.”
The exhibition invites audiences to encounter works that create emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder. It features work by: Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard, David Wojnarowicz, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
27 June – 13 September 2026
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