Yinka Shonibare MBE
16 February - 24 March 2012
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| © Yinka Shonibare MBE
Fake Death Picture (The Death of Chatterton - Henry Wallis), 2011
digital chromogenic print
50 x 62 5/8 inches
127 x 159.07 cm |
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YINKA SHONIBARE, MBE
Addio del Passato
16 February - 24 March, 2012
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by
British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE opening February 16th
and running through March 24th. In this multi-part exhibition of new
sculptures, photoworks and the premiere of a new film, Shonibare
explores the concept of destiny as it relates to themes of desire,
yearning, love, power and sexual repression.
Yinka Shonibare, well known for creating multi-faceted conceptual art
work, continues to draw our attention to patterns of history and how
they are repeated in our own time. Following the installation of the
artist’s widely acclaimed work Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle on the Fourth
Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, Shonibare continues his explorations
of Lord Nelson, the figurehead of the British Empire at its apotheosis.
Nelson’s destiny was to fall a hero at the Battle of Trafalgar just as
the British Empire’s ultimate destiny became its inevitable demise.
Shonibare sees a similar fate reflected on the front pages of today’s
newspapers: "The Imperial West is in decline at a time of great economic
challenges as we see the rise of the East. The old world is in decline
and new worlds are emerging through the economic successes of China and
India and the revolutions in the Arab world. We are re-experiencing a
new Age of the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'.”
The main gallery will feature a series of five new photoworks entitled
Fake Death Pictures. The artist refers to this series as "a re-enactment
of suicide through the history of death in Painting.” Shonibare
imagines a dramatized vision of the tragic event of Nelson’s death as
played out over a series of five photographic allegories based on
classic scenes in painting. The series brings together painting, stage
design and photography to create works in the manner of The Suicide by
Leonardo Alenza y Nieto (1839) and Édouard Manet (1877), The Death of
Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856), Death of St. Francis by Bartolomé
Carducho (1593), and Death of Leonardo da Vinci by François-Guillaume
Ménageot (1781).
Two sculptural installations of costumes constructed in period details
with Shonibare’s signature patterned fabric will be displayed alongside
the photographs in the main gallery space. Although this fabric has
become a signifier of "Africanness”, it is in fact a textile produced by
the Dutch with patterns influenced by Indonesian batiks. And therein
lays the irony: despite the misunderstanding surrounding the fabric’s
cultural origins, it has come to represent a true African identity. The
significance of the fabric has provided a conceptual underpinning in
Shonibare’s practice since its beginnings.
In the back gallery on view is the film Addio Del Passato ("so closes my
sad story”) in which the character of Frances Nisbet, Lord Nelson’s
estranged wife, sings the eponymous aria from the last act of Verdi’s
opera La Traviata. Shonibare finds a parallel in the story of Nelson’s
betrayal of his wife and his passionate love affair with Lady Hamilton
to the feelings of loss and yearning as expressed by the opera’s heroine
Violetta on the eve of her death.
On display in the front gallery will be three sculptures of fetish
objects and sex aids from bygone eras. With characteristic wit,
Shonibare presents his audience with two reproductions of
anti-masturbation devices—one for women and one for men—that are
fascinating objects of beauty and horror. Complementing the array will
be a pair of fetish boots whose improbable proportions connote both
domination and submission.
Yinka Shonibare MBE (b.1962) lives and works in London, UK. He received
the prestigious Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square from the
mayor of London in 2009, and his midcareer survey exhibition originated
in 2008 at the MCA Sydney, Australia and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum
of Art and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian through
2009. Upcoming in 2012 are two important public art commissions in
London to be announced shortly. Shonibare 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 and he was a Turner
Prize finalist in 2004.
www.jamescohan.com
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