archiveshonibare

Wallace Berman, Willie Loman: The Rise and Fall (Gluttons), 1009, C-type print, Edition of 5 + 2 APs (77.8 228.6 cm, framed 199.5 x 250 cm.

Shinobare's Meditation on Redemption in the Tragedy of Everyman

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, 2009, Installation View.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Crash Willy, 2009, Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, leather, fibreglass and metal, 132 x 198 x 260cm.

Stephen Friedman
25-28 Old Burlington St.
+44 (0) 20 7494 1434
London
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Willy Loman:
The Rise and Fall
October 14-
November 20, 2009

“Theatricality is certainly a device in my work, it is a way of setting the stage…There is no obligation to truth in such a setting so you have the leeway to create fiction or to dream.”

— Yinka Shonibare
in conversation with Anthony Downey.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Pub. MCA Sydney & Prestel New York (2008), p.41.

The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for the new body of photographic and sculptural work included in this exhibition. Photographed in 1898, The First Fatal Car Crash records death as a spectacle for the first time. A curious crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle, its once powerful form now lying redundant in a heap in this haunting image. Over a century later, Shonibare creates a similar scene of destruction in a sculptural dramatization of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman. Here, a life-sized cross section of the doomed vehicle in which Loman died of his own volition, confronts viewers head-on. The character slumps lifelessly in the driver’s seat, having finally met his pitiful end. Willy Loman becomes a contemporary protagonist in this powerful body of new work, suggesting a parallel between Miller’s 20th century examination of greed and the human condition, and the present day.

"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid … Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person."

—Death of a Salesman
Act 1, Part 8, pg. 40

The narrative of Loman’s demise continues in a new body of photographs. Working from a series of etchings of Dante’s Inferno made by Gustave Doré in 1861, Shonibare has situated the character in a photographic re-imagining of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. These stark and confrontational tableaux pose the question; where would Loman be found in this symbolic afterlife? The third circle of hell as prescribed for the Gluttons; the fourth circle for the Avaricious; or perhaps the eighth circle, as reserved for the Thieves? Inspired by 20th century history paintings these large-scale works present the crowd of humanity as a surging mass of bodies, though here the crowd is anonymous and naked. Typical of Shonibare’s previous enquiries into a wide range of historical sources, timescales are collapsed and narratives are distorted in these commanding works.

This exhibition also marks a development into a new medium for the artist; the Climate Shit drawings are a new body of work on paper created over the last year. Part stream of consciousness, part collage, these drawings convey an immediacy as the artist responds to the turbulence documented in the media alongside his own daily experiences. Hand written text, line drawing, gold leaf and collage collide to create kaleidoscopic compositions. Airplanes hover above a dizzying landscape of wind turbines, economic graphs and news of rising oil prices. The contrasting delicacy of sensuous gold foil and batik flowers suggests the collision of economic, aesthetic and personal realms.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b. 1962, London) lives and works in London. His Fourth Plinth commission Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle is unveiled at Trafalgar Square in April 2010. His major touring survey exhibition recently closed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and will reopen at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, in November 2009. A solo commission by the artist for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will open in 2010. Other recent solo shows include A Centenary Commission, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ireland (2009); Party Time: Re-Imagine America, Ballentine House, Newark Museum, New York (2009). Forthcoming and recent group shows include The Second Moscow Bienniale of Contemporary Art, The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (September 2009); The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009).

In late July 2010 Shonibare will curate an exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, with works from their own collection to mark the opening of the recently re-furbished permanent collection Galleries.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Crash Willy, 2009, Mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, leather, fibreglass and metal, 132 x 198 x 260cm.

Yinka Shonibare, Diary of Victorian Dandy 03 Hours.

Unraveling the Pervasive Web of Colonialism and Reason Run Amok

Yinka Shonibare, Un Ballo in Maschera 1.

Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa, Installation View.

Yinka Shonibare, Diary of Victorian Dandy 17 Hours.

Yinka Shonibare, Diary of Victorian Dandy 11 Hours.

Yinka Shonibare, How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (ladies).

Yinka Shonibare, Odile and Odette 2.

Yinka Shonibare, Dorian Gray 2 (Scene 10).

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
718-638-5000
Brooklyn
Schapiro Wing, Fourth Floor Galleries,Blum Gallery, First Floor
Yinka Shonibare MBE
June 26-September 20, 2009

The art of British-based, Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE explores the relationship of contemporary African identity to European colonialism. Yinka Shonibare MBE includes more than 20 works — sculptures, paintings, large-scale installations, and films.

There will also be a site specific installation created for this presentation featuring small children and titled Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play that will be on view in several of the Museum’s period rooms.

Shonibare is best known for working with visual symbols, especially the richly patterned Dutch wax fabric, produced in Europe for a West African market, which he uses in a wide range of applications. His tableaux of headless mannequins costumed in this fabric evoke themes of history and its legacy for future generations. Through these works he explores the complex web of interactions, both economic and racial, that reveal inequalities between the dominant and colonized cultures of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The exhibition is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. Judy Kim, Brooklyn Museum Curator of Exhibitions and Head of the Exhibitions Division, will coordinate the presentation, after which it will travel to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.

Shonibare was born in 1962 in the United Kingdom to Nigerian parents, who returned to Lagos with their children when he was three. When he was 17 he relocated to London, where he currently lives and works.

He studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at the Byam Shaw School of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and is in public and private collections throughout the world. In 2005 Shonibare was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire, MBE, a distinction he uses despite and because of its irony.

While in art school Shonibare was asked why his work was not African in theme, a question that eventually led him to address issues of stereotypes and authenticity in his work. He selected the Dutch wax fabrics for use in multiple applications because they had become a signifier of authentic African identity while evoking a sense of ambiguity and complex origins; he opted to purchase them in London rather than Africa to render the material’s connotations of African exoticism false.

Citing feminist theory and deconstructionist literature as influences on his work, Shonibare explores the idea of the outsider masquerading within the dominant culture while remaining peripheral or external to it. Also influential are painters such as Thomas Gainsborough and Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who portrayed the 18th-century culture of excess. Shonibare’s sculpture installation The Swing (2001), which responds to Fragonard’s 1767 painting of the same name, depicting a privileged young woman at leisure, will be included in the exhibition.

In the site specific installation Mother and Father Work Hard so I Can Play, Shonibare will draw upon what he views as the expressions of American middle-class aspiration and achievement exemplified in the Museum’s period rooms to create a sort of treasure hunt. Headless figures of mischievous children whose presence will not be immediately apparent will be seen playing in unexpected and physically challenging positions. The figures, exemplifying privileged youth, will be clad in Victorian costume made from African fabrics.

Also on view will be Scramble for Africa (2003), in which the artist draws upon the moment in 19th-century expansionism when leading world powers carved up the continent of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. Various statesmen, typically headless, are huddled around a table using a large map of Africa to stake their claims. Also on view will be Black Gold II, one of a series of paintings that explores themes of colonial domination and exploitation, in which multi-national companies extract Africa’s natural resources while its indigenous people live in poverty.

Shonibare continues his exploration of themes of wealth, class, and privilege with The Victorian Philanthropists’ Parlour (1996-97), the artist’s version of an opulent 19-century interior, replete with furniture upholstered with Dutch wax fabrics and designed like a stage set in which visitors will be able to walk around. Also on view will be Diary of a Victorian Dandy, a suite of five large-scale photographs showing the dandy’s activities throughout the course of a day and featuring Shonibare and a supporting cast in Victorian costume.

The exhibition will include two recent films, among them Un Ballo in Maschera (2004), which takes its title from the Verdi opera (2004), inspired by the assassination of Swedish King Gustav III at a masked ball in Stockholm. An ambitious, technically complex project, the 32-minute costume drama features performers in Dutch-wax-fabric ball gowns, frock coats, and Venetian masks, and explores themes of frivolity and excess.

Yinka Shonibare MBE is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by Prestel, including essays by Rachel Kent, Senior Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, who organized the exhibition, and by Robert Hobbs, Rhoda Thalheimer Endowed Chair in Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Also included is an in-depth interview with Yinka Shonibare conducted by Anthony Downey, Ph.D., Programme Director of the M. A. in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute in London.

Yinka Shonibare, The Age of Enlightenment Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

Yinka Shonibare, Odile and Odette 1.

Yinka Shonibare, The Sleep of Reason – America.

Yinka Shonibare, Deep Blue.

National Identity and the Impulse of Colonialism Born of Hubris

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Odile and Odette, 2005, High definition digital video, 14 mins 28 secs, Edition 6 + 2APs, Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
1/F Building 1, No.1 Lane
170 Yue Yang Road
(86) 21.54.66.0825
Shanghai
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
September 11-
November 8, 2008

Shonibare's photographs and sculptures dating from 2005 through 2008 address the colonialist impulse and the struggles with power and identity that result from it.

On view will be the photograph, La Méduse (2008),which recalls the French ship that was wrecked off of the coast of Senegal in 1819 as it was on its way to retake possession of the African land from the British. Shonibare's ship is depicted in the moment just before its demise, and the artist uses the frigate's precarious state to hint at the world's present vulnerabilities. Also presented will be the 2008 series The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The five richly-hued photographs are based on Francisco Goya y Luciente's etching of the same name. Shonibare has reworked Goya's original warning against irrational behavior and expanded its reach, depicting figures who together represent five of the world's continents. Each figure is outfitted in Victorian-style garments made from what we have come to recognize as African textiles — in fact, cloth that was originally imported by the Dutch to Africa but which has become so closely associated with the continent that it is assumed to be indigenous. Accompanying the photos will be Immanuel Kant (2008), sculpted after the Age of Enlightenment philosopher and presented with amputated legs — a fictional disability suggesting that intelligence can be a hindrance when it creates a damaging thirst for conquest.

Earlier works by Shonibare include Eleanor Hewitt (2005), a sculpture of the American collector born in the 19th century playfully perched atop stilts to indicate her elevated taste and adventurous spirit, as well as several of Shonibare's Toy Paintings from his 2005 series. Also shown will be the film Odile and Odette (2005), in which two ballerinas — one black , one white — dance the Swan Lake roles, separated by a mirror to indicate the interplay between reality and reflection, conscious and unconscious.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b.1962) is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist whose work is influenced by the culture of Nigeria, where he grew up, and England, where he studied and now lives. Shonibare's recent solo exhibitions include The Hayward Flag Project (2007, The Hayward Gallery, London), Le jardin d'amour (2007, Musée de quai Branly, Paris), and Scratch the Surface (2007, National Gallery, London). He is the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia (September 2008), traveling to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 2009.. The artist was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004, and he was awarded the title of Member of the British Empire in 2005. His work was included in the African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. The artist's proposal for the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square was recently selected as one of two public works to be realized on the site.

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Immanuel Kant, Life-size fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed media, Figure: 29-1/2 x 41 x 31-1/2", Plinth: 88-1/2 x 82-1/2 x 6", Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery, Art © 2008 Yinka Shonibare.