Yinka Shonibare valuation
Dresses headless Victorian figures in Dutch wax fabric to unpick empire, trade and identity.
Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962 and moved to Lagos with his family at three, returning to England at seventeen.
What a work by Yinka Shonibare is worth
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Bio
Yinka Shonibare was born in London in 1962 and moved to Lagos with his family at three, returning to England at seventeen. At eighteen, as he began art school, he contracted transverse myelitis, which left one side of his body paralysed, and he has since worked with assistants under his direction. He studied at Byam Shaw School of Art and took his MFA at Goldsmiths, graduating among the Young British Artists. His signature material is the brightly patterned Dutch wax cotton sold across West Africa, made in the Netherlands from Indonesian batik designs, which he uses to dress headless mannequins in Victorian and eighteenth-century costume, restage paintings such as Fragonard's The Swing, and question ideas of authentic African identity. He showed in Sensation in 1997, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2004, and was elected a Royal Academician in 2013.
Sculptures, photographs, prints, wind sculptures and works on paper all come to market, and his work appears regularly at auction. Many sculptures are unique and others editioned, so the edition, the condition of the fabric and the completeness of each figure matter. A provenance through his galleries is usual.
Goldsmiths, the Fourth Plinth and the dandy
Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, a scale model of HMS Victory with sails of Dutch wax cloth, stood on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square from 2010 and is now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
His photographic series Diary of a Victorian Dandy casts the artist himself as a Victorian gentleman at the centre of a grand household. He was appointed CBE in 2019.
Brixton cloth, documenta XI and Guest Projects
Shonibare's father practised law in Lagos, and the family kept a home in London. After Goldsmiths he worked as an arts development officer for Shape Arts, which opens the arts to disabled people, and it was about six years before he worked with a commercial gallery; his first solo exhibition was at the Byam Shaw Gallery in 1989. Since 1994 he has bought the wax-printed cloth himself, from a fabric shop in Brixton. Okwui Enwezor commissioned Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for documenta XI in 2002, the work that made his name internationally; Scramble for Africa, of 2003, restages the Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885, and his reworkings of paintings include Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads, of 1998, after Gainsborough, and Reverend on Ice, of 2005, after Raeburn.
His Turner Prize nomination in 2004 was for Double Dutch at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and his show at Stephen Friedman. A mid-career survey opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2008 and toured to the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in 2009; Wind Sculpture VII has stood outside that museum since 2016, and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town acquired Wind Sculpture (SG) III, the first of the series in Africa. He runs Guest Projects, a space for emerging artists in Broadway Market in east London, and his foundation has an artists' house in Lagos and a residency on a farm outside the city. He received the Whitechapel Gallery's Art Icon Award in 2021.
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