To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates
16 May 2025 – 25 January 2026 Hayward Gallery Touring, UK
A major group exhibition curated by one of the foremost painters working today
“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. Each artist here invents the language they need and there is magic in it.” – Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Hayward Gallery Touring presents To Improvise A Mountain, curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Bringing together artists that have been critical to her way of seeing and thinking, Yiadom-Boakye invites audiences on a personal journey through different geographies, generations of artists, and artworks that create their own emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder.
Both an artist and a writer, Yiadom-Boakye is renowned for her oil paintings of imagined, enigmatic subjects. She says of her process: “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 and a means of thinking through what is felt. That’s how I wanted to approach this show. And I wanted to bring together works by artists whose vision beguiles me: fellow poets, dreamers, thinkers and wanderers.”
Intuitive and guided by poetry’s dynamic ability to think through rhythm, image and feeling, the exhibition brings Yiadom-Boakye’s work into conversation with an eclectic range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process.
Among the artists featured in this exhibition are Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert and David Wojnarowicz.
Tour dates:
16 May – 5 October 2025 (last days!)
Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
25 October 2025 – 25 January 2026
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes