Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Known for: fictional figurative painting; the invented Black portrait subjects

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints fictional Black figures — invented from her imagination rather than from observation or photographs — in loose, quickly executed brushwork that draws on the compositional conventions of eighteenth and nineteenth-century portrait painting. She typically works on a canvas for a single day, discarding those she considers failures and keeping only those she is satisfied with. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013 and her retrospective at Tate Modern in 2020 was among the museum's most visited of that year.