Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare has recently been brought to my attention by my tutor Jon and I'm already hooked on his work! I love how the garments are beautifully tailored, and the fabric just makes them stand out even more. Such a bizarre combination of cultures and era, but it really works, and after a while you stop seeing the contrast of the Victoria style clothing with the tribal print fabric and start seeing sculptures, amazingly detailed and really ironic sculptures to be precise!

But lets give this some background first...

This is Yinka :)

"Yinka Shonibare MBE RA was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art first at Byam Shaw College of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA, graduating as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He currently lives and works in the East End of London.

Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. Using this wide range of media, Shonibare examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mixing Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions."

http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com/biography/