Yinka Shonibare CBE

Donated for #100NHSROOMS is a print from Shonibare’s ‘Unstructured Icons’ series.

The series of prints playfully deconstruct icons of ‘Western Power’ by de-westernising them through masking their faces with African masks. The prints parody 18th Century excess enabled by colonisation and the slave trade, an excessive life style which celebrated opulent fashions and the outrageous wearing of elaborately decorated wigs and sumptuously expensive textiles. A life style which lead to the demise of the Ancien Regime in France. Dogon style animal masks from Mali in West Africa are juxtaposed onto the faces of the18th century aristocracy, such as Pope Innocent X, , Henry Vlll or Queen Elizabeth I. In these works, Shonibare juxtaposes the patterns of Western power with the patterns of African textiles to further explore power relations and the layers of the complexity of 21st century hybrid identities. Shonibare collages actual Batik textiles into these woodcuts to further highight the complexity of contrast formally in the prints themselves.

Yinka Shonibare CBE, Unstructured Icons – King, 2018, Relief print with woodblock and fabric collage on Somerset Tub Sized Satin 410gsm paper, contained within a wooden portfolio box bound in Dutch wax batik fabric selected by the artist. Courtesy the artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London

Yinka Shonibar CBE, Unstructured Icons – King, installed in Whipps Cross Hospital Peace Ward staffroom

Yinka Shonibare CBE was born in 1962 in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study at Byam School of Art, then at Goldsmiths College. Shonibare’s wide-ranging work explores issues of race and class through. His trademark material is the brightly coloured ‘African’ batik fabric he buys in London. This type of fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to the colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.

Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and internationally at leading museums. Shonibare’s work, ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ was the 2010 Fourth Plinth Commission, and was displayed in Trafalgar Square, London, until January 2012. It was the first commission by a black British artist and was part of a national fundraising campaign organized by the Art Fund and the National Maritime Museum. In 2019 he was also awarded the decoration of Commander of the ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ or CBE, a title he has added to his professional name.

Shonibare’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and VandenBroek Foundation, The Netherlands.