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.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
