Opening at Leeds Art Gallery from May 16th to October 5th, 2025, To Improvise a Mountain is a new Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition curated by celebrated British painter and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The show will travel to MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (October 25th, 2025–February 8th, 2026), and Nottingham Castle (March 20th–June 21st, 2026). Drawing on her dual practices as a painter and poet, Yiadom-Boakye brings together a deeply personal selection of artworks that have shaped her way of seeing and feeling.
This expansive group show explores the emotional and imaginative landscapes that emerge through the act of making, placing historical and contemporary works in poetic dialogue. The exhibition includes artists such as Walter Sickert, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Barbara Chase-Riboud, The Otolith Group, and David Wojnarowicz. Each piece has been chosen for its resonance with Yiadom-Boakye’s own artistic practice and its ability to evoke mood, rhythm, and intuition.
One key work is Sickert’s raw, psychologically charged painting from the Leeds collection, which contrasts with the dreamlike, speculative films of The Otolith Group. Yiadom-Boakye has said that the exhibition was guided by intuition, comparing the curatorial process to both poetry and painting—where meaning emerges from patterns, repetitions, and relationships.
The show’s title comes from a line in Miles Davis’s Inamorata, underscoring the exhibition’s improvisational, ungraspable quality. Brian Cass of Hayward Gallery Touring describes the project as an imaginative journey into the moods and emotions artworks can summon. With To Improvise a Mountain, Yiadom-Boakye invites audiences to encounter a spirit of infinite knowing—one shaped not by logic, but by feeling.
Procession, 2023. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48.2 x 71.1 x 2.5 cm.
Courtesy of JENNIFER PACKER, CORVI-MORA, London and SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO, New York