Artist: Michaela Yearwood-Dan

‘Looking at Michaela’s work, you’re left with a sense of boundless possibility.’—Curator Ekow Eshun

Through paintings, sculpture, site-specific murals and installations, Michaela Yearwood-Dan endeavors to build spaces of community, abundance and joy. Yearwood-Dan’s debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth takes place in London, featuring new paintings ranging from monumental to intimate in scale, including an expansive 11 meter-long panelled landscape painting, alongside richly adorned, ceramic sculptures and benches. The lyrical quality of the paintings will be complemented by a new sound piece made in collaboration with the composer Alex Gruz.

Yearwood-Dan’s unique visual language draws on a diverse range of influences, including Blackness, queerness, femininity and healing rituals. Moving freely between media and resisting any singular definition of identity, the artist explores the possibilities of creating spaces—physical, pastoral, metaphorical—that allow for unlimited and unbounded ways of being.

Lush and brightly hued, Yearwood-Dan’s work is at once personal and political. She often engages colors and materials for their symbolic associations, such as ceramic petals collaged into her recent paintings that evoke the queer histories of carnations and pansies. The surfaces of her canvases are dense with generous swathes of lavish pigments and textures, with intricate embellishments using subversive and non-traditional materials such as gold leaf, Swarovski crystals, sequins and glitter. Language intertwines with botanical motifs throughout the work, where abstract habitats teem with painted plant life, alongside inscribed lines of text pulled from song lyrics, poetry or her own diaristic writings. Her words beckon the viewer into a vivid, welcoming world of paradox, play and contemplation formed within an atmosphere of swirling forms and brilliant chromaticity.