This lauded 30-year-old Black British painter closed out 2024 on a high, joining the prestigious Hauser & Wirth gallery, while maintaining US representation with the equally respected Marianne Boesky gallery.
Yearwood-Dan, who was born in South London, creates ceramics and installations too, but is best-known for her large, lush, semi-abstract paintings, in which flutters of millennial pinks abut lush snippets of vegetation, oblique texts, song lyrics, as well as blurry, Ab-Ex swatches, fluffy neo-Rococo frills, and, at points, even gold leaf, acrylic nails, and Swarovski crystals.
Winter saw her take up a working residency at Hauser & Wirth’s bucolic space in Bruton, Somerset, in the West of England. The artist said the days in spent in the English countryside served as a useful creative reset.
“I’ve been using this time to reflect and re-center after a small break from painting. The work I made here has been a result of that freedom,” she explains in an interview on hauserwirth.com. “I’ve been using this time to think and plan my intentions for projects coming up, including my debut solo show with the gallery in London.”
Yearwood-Dan also took the time to catch up on some music. Lyrics from British rappers and Jamaican dancehall stars have made their way into previous paintings, and judging by the Spotify playlist the artist posted to accompany her Somerset residency, we could well see references to Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Ezra Collective, Tyler, the Creator, and Bon Iver appear in her 2025 show.
The date for this forthcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London spaces has yet to be confirmed, but, it is hotly anticipated. Yearwood-Dan’s works are in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, FL; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; the Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami, FL; and the Columbus Museum of Art and the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH.
Back in spring 2023, Christie’s London set a new auction record for the artist, when her 2021 painting, Love me nots, sold for 12 times its initial estimate, with a hammer price of $880,000.
The 2025 London show will be complemented by a couple of ongoing group exhibitions: Conversations, an exhibition of work by 40 leading Black women and non-binary artists, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, UK, which runs until 9 March 2025; and When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, a group exhibition which remains on view at Dallas Museum of Art, in the US, until 13 April 2025.
That latter show features 60 works by 50 artists, alongside Yearwood-Dan, and aims to widen and calibrate official art histories, to allow for richer representations of groups who have been traditionally excluded or erased.
It’s a brilliant, nuanced, and perfectly timed exhibition. The artist favors abstraction partly because it allows for both autobiography and ambiguity, while leaving room for personal interpretation on the part of the onlooker.
“I want the viewer to really just look and spend time with the work, finding snippets of text and allowing those and the colorful motifs to mean something personal to them,” she told shondaland.com. “I want them to trust what they feel when they look at the work and, of course, honor my intentions but also sit with how introspective it makes them feel.”
That’s good advice for almost any art lover going through 2025, but particularly fitting for this exciting young prospect. Take a look at Hospital Rooms, 2023, a beautiful, archival print, below, and keep a look out in the coming months for an exciting new Artspace limited edition with Michaela Yearwood-Dan.
MICHAELA YEARWOOD-DAN - Hospital Rooms, 2023
