Michaela Yearwood-Dan doesn’t just paint—she composes worlds. With sweeping, impasto brushstrokes and text plucked from poetry, pop lyrics, or her own diaries, her canvases thrum with color and consciousness. They are neither wholly abstract nor resolutely figurative. Instead, they are lyrical habitats—lush, queer, unapologetically intimate.

Born in London in 1994, Yearwood-Dan rose meteorically through the ranks of contemporary art, shaking loose the last century’s tired definitions of abstraction. Her work, rich with florals and fervor, weaves personal and political threads into something tactile, something living. In the vast canon of abstraction—historically dominated by the sanitized gestures of straight white men—her voice cuts through like a gospel refrain.

Think of my paintings like albums, they’re a record of feeling.

– She once said, perched amid remnants of her handmade wedding decor.

This is abstraction not of distance, but of closeness. A glittering intimacy that demands your whole body to listen.

The Domestic as Monumental

Step into a Michaela Yearwood-Dan exhibition and you may feel like you’ve stumbled into a carnival garden built from memory, love letters, and riotous color. Her paintings often stretch to nearly eight meters across, not just filling a room but reconfiguring it. Yet within this grandeur, a gentler domesticity hums.

Carnation petals and painted pansies aren’t mere decoration—they’re symbols, part of a queer visual lexicon. The colors echo pride flags; the plant life recalls Caribbean gardens and Catholic rituals. Her ceramics—some wall-mounted, others freestanding—sprout real houseplants or cradle painted text. The domestic and the divine, collapsing into one another.

It’s a practice shaped by both scale and story. Whether in monumental canvases or smaller “bonus track” works, her pieces feel like rooms you could live inside: rooms filled with music, memory, and the smell of rain on soil.

Community as Canvas

Yearwood-Dan’s studio is not merely a space for production, but a site of connection. She is a weaver of networks—of friends, of artists, of collectors, of curators.

She brings people together, she is a connector and an enricher—it’s a real superpower.

– Says Jordan Bosher of Michael Werner Gallery.

That superpower extends into her installations. In her 2022 mural at Queercircle, London, she made space—literally—for LGBTQ+ voices and presence. Her sound collaborations, such as those with composer Alex Gruz, add a hymn-like echo to her visual work. Think choral vocals layered with club beats—a spiritual rave in the chapel of selfhood.

This intersection of community, spirituality, and pop culture is the beating heart of Yearwood-Dan’s practice. She paints not just herself, but the ecosystem of care, chosen family, and shared history that surrounds her.

From South London to Hauser & Wirth

Raised in a working-class Catholic household in Putney, Yearwood-Dan was a prodigy of persistence. She wasn’t “born into the art world,” as she puts it, and rarely set foot in galleries growing up. Her influences came instead from Tumblr scrolls, mixtapes, and museum postcards.

After graduating from the University of Brighton in 2016—top of her class, of course—she gave herself six months to make it as an artist. It took her five. By 2019, she was showing with Tiwani Contemporary. By 2021, she’d joined Marianne Boesky. Now, in 2024, she’s one of the youngest artists on the roster at Hauser & Wirth.

Yet despite her rising star (and rising auction prices—her work “Love Me Nots” sold for over £730,000 at Christie’s in 2023), she remains rooted in her East London studio, married to the same ethos that shaped her earliest works: love, honesty, and hard-earned joy.

Joy as Resistance

There is a political charge in Yearwood-Dan’s chromatic excess. These aren’t escapist pleasures—they’re counter-narratives. In a world that so often flattens or fetishizes queer Black bodies, she paints abundance. She paints softness. She paints interiors that hold multitudes.

The text in her paintings is often whispered, half-hidden.

Please keep smiling… let your soul shine…

– reads one letter from a stranger on a train that became the seed for a new body of work.

Her brushwork moves like breath—sinuous, sudden, always alive. She speaks to something primal: not just the eye, but the gut.

And when she turns to sculpture—ceramic vessels glowing with glaze, shape-shifting like the music that inspired them—she creates another kind of space. A holding space. A space of memory, of metamorphosis.

A New Era of Abstract Painting

Michaela Yearwood-Dan stands alongside a new wave of British painters like Rachel Jones and Jadé Fadojutimi—artists who are reshaping abstraction with the full force of their personal narratives.

They’re not standing in the shadow of the past, rather they’re illuminating new possibilities in the nature of painting.

– As curator Ekow Eshun says.

Those possibilities are abundant in Yearwood-Dan’s work. Her palette pulses with spirit. Her brushwork defies translation. Her exhibitions feel less like viewing and more like communion.

If Rothko painted the sublime and Pollock painted chaos, Yearwood-Dan paints joy. But joy with teeth. Joy that holds you. Joy that says: I was here. I am still here. Look.