Yinka Shonibare - Selected Artworks/exhibitions

Selected Artworks/exhibitions

Shonibare's first solo exhibition was in 1989 at Byam Shaw Gallery, London. During 2008-2009, he was the subject of a major midcareer survey in both Australia and the USA; starting in September 2008 at the MCA Sydney and toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in June 2009 and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in October 2009. . For the 2009 Brooklyn Museum exhbition, he created a site-specific installation titled Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play which was on view in several of the Museum’s period rooms. Another site-specific installation, Party Time—Re-Imagine America: A Centennial Commission was simultaneously on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, from July 1, 2009, to January 3, 2010, in the dining room of the museum’s 1885 Ballantine House.

• 1991 Dysfunctional Family - cuddly looking sculptures of aliens covered in fabric
• 1994 Double Dutch - small deep squares of stretched fabric painted over, on a shocking pink wall
• 1997 Sensation A group exhibition drawn from the personal collection of Charles Saatchi - Shonibare had two Victorian style dresses in the show in the style of Dressing Down
• 1997 Cha Cha Cha' - a pair of 1950s women's shoes, covered in fabric and encased in a perspex cube
• 1997 Feather Pink More squares of fabric, painted on both the front and edges, with a white background
• 1998 Diary of A Victorian Dandy - photographs of Shonibare in group setups reminiscent of A Rake's Progress by Hogarth, commissioned for the London Underground
• 1999 Dressing Down exhibition at the Ikon Gallery], Birmingham, UK.
• 2000 Vacation - Space suited men covered in African fabric, busy up at the ceilings by the chandeliers
• 2001 Dorian Gray - atmospheric black and white photographs of Shonibare as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray
• 2001 The Swing (after Fragonard) - a headless lifesize recreation of Fragonard's model clothed in African fabric
• 2001 Henry James and Hendrik C. Andersen - two clothed headless lifesize models of the writer James and the sculptor Andersen, symbolising their friendship and commissioned by The British School at Rome
• 2001 The Three Graces - Three headless lifesize models of women of varying proportions, in Victorian dress made from African fabric
• 2002 Gallantry and Criminal Conversation - an installation including a suspended coach, wooden chests and 18 headless 18th century figures engaged in copulation
• 2003 Maxa - circles of partially painted fabric on a deep blue wall
• 2004 Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)] - his first film, showing the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden through dance
• 2005 Lady on Unicycle - a headless Victorian lady in knickerbockers joyously caught frozen mid-cycle
• 2008 Yinka Shonibare: Major Solo Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
• 2009 Yinka Shonibare: Major Solo Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, USA.
• 2009-2010 Yinka Shonibare MBE: Major Solo Exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (organized and toured by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia)
• 2010-2012 Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, London, Trafalgar Square, Fourth Plinth
• 2010 Before and After Modernism: Byam Shaw, Rex Vicat Cole, Yinka Shonibare MBE