To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates

An exhibition of international artists working across painting, photography, drawing, film, installation, and sculpture from the 19th century to today.

Featuring: Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, 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.

“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

Curated by figurative painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, To Improvise a Mountain combines an eclectic range of historical and contemporary artists—including Yiadom-Boakye herself—illuminating her creative process. Coming to prominence in the early 2010s, Yiadom-Boakye is both an artist and a writer, renowned for her oil paintings of imagined subjects.

Works have been selected based on their personal impact on the artist. The exhibition invites audiences on her journey across different geographies and generations of artists.

To Improvise a Mountain interweaves artworks that explore themes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, identity, activism, and beauty, ranging from the visceral Post-Impressionism of Walter Sickert to the radical video essays of The Otolith Group.

This project is inspired by a phrase from Miles Davis’s song Inamorata (1971), which asks: “Who is this music that which description may never justify? / Can the ocean be described?” For Yiadom-Boakye, poetry is similar to painting in its ability to translate the intangible into images and to think through rhythm and feeling.

Yiadom-Boakye expands: “My deployment of words in writing is not always so different from my use of brush marks in painting. The logic, patterns, relationships, repetitions, and decisions are guided by intuition—the rightness and wrongness, the blatancies and subtleties—and that’s how I want to approach this show.”

Brian Cass, Senior Curator of Hayward Gallery Touring, says: “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye brings us on an imaginative journey of encounters with artworks that—like her remarkable paintings—conjure different moods, personalities, colours, and emotions. Her curation celebrates the imaginative spirit of the contributing artists, and the endless potential of art to bring new thinking and feeling into existence, continuing Hayward Gallery Touring’s longstanding history of partnering with artists on ambitious exhibitions that invite audiences inside their worlds.”

To Improvise a Mountain: Curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition. The exhibition is developed in partnership with Leeds Art Gallery, MK Gallery, and Nottingham Castle, supporting the Southbank Centre’s ongoing mission to create experiences for the nation’s enjoyment.

Anthony Spira, Director, MK Gallery, says: “We are thrilled to present this remarkable exhibition, with such a varied and rich group of artists. It provides rare insight into the world of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, one of the most exciting artists working today, sharing her thoughts, conversations, and inspirations in a display that is captivating, challenging, and powerful.”

This exhibition is on show at MK Gallery 25 October 2025 – 25 January 2026

Main Image - Jennifer Packer, Procession