About the work
Describing himself as a ‘post-colonial hybrid’, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA creates work that explores issues of race and class through the media of sculpture, painting, photography, film, pictorial quilts and public works. Material (SG) IV captures the idea of harnessing the wind and freezing it in a moment of time. Imbued with a remarkable sense of dynamism, the sculpture resembles a vast sheet of fabric, billowing in the breeze.
The work is a commanding alternative to conventional monuments of personal power, instead exploring universal experience of historical change. The sculpture was born out of the artist’s Fourth Plinth commission Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle for London’s Trafalgar Square in 2010. Shonibare felt that the ship’s sails, emblazoned with his signature Dutch wax batik fabric, could stand alone. The fabric was originally inspired by Indonesian designs, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a signifier of African identity and independence and, in Shonibare’s hands, the ‘perfect metaphor for multi-layered identities’. Adorned with this iconic design, the sculpture becomes a powerful symbol of the movement of people and global interconnectivity over time.
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About the artist
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962, London) was awarded the decoration of Most Excellent Order of the British Empire or MBE in 2004 and Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire or CBE in 2019. Shonibare received the prestigious Art Icon Award from Whitechapel Gallery, London and an honorary degree from The Courtauld Institute, London in 2021.
Examples of Shonibare’s monumental Wind Sculpture series are permanently installed in the Royal Djurgården Sculpture Park in Stockholm, Sweden (2022), Howick Place, London (2014) and Davidson College, North Carolina (2018). A new iteration, Material (SG) I, was unveiled at the Whitman-Walker Health Center, Washington DC in 2019 and the second edition was installed at 360 Rosemary, West Palm Beach, Florida in 2021
For more information, please visit the gallery website: Stephen Friedman Gallery
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