Private View

Rebecca Bradbury picks out five important forthcoming exhibitions – and highlights what you can learn from them and apply to your own practice

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League with The Night 18 November 2020 to 9 May 2021

Known for her enigmatic portraits of people who don’t exist, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is widely considered one of the most important figurative painters working today, making this extensive and delayed survey of her two-decade-long career a must-see.

Winner of the Carnegie Prize in 2018, as well as other prestigious accolades, the British-Ghanaian artist does not attach her predominantly black fictional figures to a particular historical moment. Instead you, the viewer, are left to project your own interpretation.

While her paintings are rooted in traditional considerations, such as line, scale and colour (a go-to palette of dark, dramatic tones), the way in which she handles the paint is decidedly contemporary. Working spontaneously and rapidly, she uses thick and rough brushstrokes, but notice how each and every one is perfectly considered.

Tate Britain, London. www.tate.org.uk

RIGHT Lynette YiadomBoakye, Citrine by the Ounce, 2014

© LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE

© COURTESY THE ARTIST

Jock McFadyen Goes to the Pictures 14 November 2020 to 7 March 2021

With a career spanning 50-odd years, contemporary Scottish painter Jock McFadyen is regularly described as “raw” or “gritty”. In his landscapes, both urban and rural, as well as his figurative paintings, he always shows a predilection for the damaged and the fractured, managing to somehow convey beauty in the unsettling and unconventional. This exhibition not only gives a glimpse into the artist’s

UNTITLED: Art on the Conditions of Our Time 16 January to 5 April 2021

This progressive collection allows new ways of thinking by African diaspora artists to emerge through a less fixed approach to curation. Such liberation has brought together film, installation and photography, but fine art students in particular should seek out Kimathi Donkor’s oil paintings, which reimagine legendary and mythic encounters across Africa.

Also not to be missed is Phoebe Boswell’s animation project (Tramlines) created using her pencil drawings. She provides a masterclass on combining traditional tell stories too complex to explain in a single drawing.

Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. www.kettlesyard.co.uk

draftwomanship and digital technology to

development, but it also showcases his work side-by-side those of other Scottish artworks.

It’s an attempt to highlight visual threads that connect all pictures, a perspective that could be useful when analysing your own work. The juxtapositions can be witty, surprising or striking, but they all seek to confound the traditional boundaries of period, style and artistic posture.

City Art Centre, Edinburgh, www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk

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Kimathi Donkor, Toussaint L’Overture at Bedourete, 2004; Jock McFadyen, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 2018

Chantal Joffe: For Esme – With Love and Squalor Until 22 November 2020

Since making her breakthrough in the 1990s with small-scale paintings of pornographic material, painter Chantal Joffe has been challenging our expectations of feminist art with her intimate portraits of women, whether in images a few inches wide or 10 feet high.

Although she continues to question what makes a noble subject for art, her focus has switched to the more domestic, with the relationship between mother and daughter a key theme in this new exhibition. It captures the changing faces across the years of herself and her 16-year-old daughter Esme, showing off her expressive flair for portraiture and startingly honest self-portraits created with quick yet precise marks. Look out for how the artist’s distortion of scale and form can make a subject feel more real.

Arnolfini, Bristol. www.arnolfini.org.uk

PHOTO: BENJAMIN WESTOBY © CHANTAL JOFFE. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VICTORIA MIRO COURTESY: THE ARTIST, CORVI-MORA, LONDON AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO, NEW YORK PHOTO: MATT GRUBB

Jennifer Packer Opens 18 November 2020

Don’t miss this chance to see the first solo exhibition of Jennifer Packer to take place in Europe. The New Yorkbased artist and recent recipient of the Rome Prize has built a reputation over the past decade for creating intimate portraits and flower still life, which reveal a unique emotional and physical fragility.

Many constants run throughout this collection of paintings and large-scale drawings – her subjects are the people she is closest to; they are relaxed and seemingly unaware of her gaze. Packer’s paintings are rendered in loose line and big sweeping brush strokes using a limited colour palette. Pay attention to how this restriction causes the subject to retreat or merge into the background – and enables the artist to make skin colour secondary to the psychological aspects of her sitters.

Serpentine Gallery, London. www.serpentinegalleries.org

LEFT Jennifer Packer, Tia, 2017 BELOW Chantal Joffe, Esme at the Kitchen Table, 2020