The acclaimed exhibition of works by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye closes at Tate Britain this week (until 31 May) after a run punctuated by Covid-related delays. However, the mid-career survey will be coming back. “It will return to Tate Britain 2022-23 after its international tour,” a spokesman says.
The show is due to travel to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (3 July-19 September); K20 in Düsseldorf (16 October-13 February 2022); and Mudam in Luxembourg (dates to be announced).
The show opened in London last December after being delayed twice due to coronavirus lockdowns. Tate Britain closed again on 15 December after London was put under Tier 3 lockdown restrictions. Museums and galleries re-opened on 17 May, leaving the show with only two weeks left to run (some time slots are available later this week at Tate Britain).
The exhibition is the largest survey of the British artist’s work to date and includes around 80 works spanning the past two decades. The earliest portraits date from 2003, the year of her graduation from London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
Andrea Schlieker, the exhibition curator, told The Art Newspaper that Yiadom-Boakye’s work “is obviously political, but not with an activist capital ‘p’”, adding that the critic Hilton Als describes the painter’s work well when he says she is “interested in black society, not as it was affected or shaped by the white world, but as it exist[s] unto itself”.
Meanwhile, another Tate show—the first UK survey of activist Zanele Muholi—ends this week at Tate Modern (until 31 May) and will also make a comeback. “[It] couldn’t be extended for another season because of touring logistics and schedules, so that exhibition will also return to Tate Modern in the future [dates to be confirmed],” says the Tate spokesman. The show will tour to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, Gropius Bau in Berlin and Bildmuseet at Umea University.