Whitechapel Gallery has announced that Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962, UK) is the eighth artist to receive the prestigious annual Art Icon award, generously supported by the Swarovski Foundation.
On Monday 22nd March 2021, the award will be presented during a virtual gala celebration hosted by Iwona Blazwick OBE (Director, Whitechapel Gallery), and feature an exclusive musical performance from four-time Grammy Award winner Angélique Kidjo. To protect the safety and welfare of all attendees, the event will be hosted on a digital platform and will celebrate the Gallery’s continued commitment to youth programmes and educational activities through an evening of live presentations.
“Yinka Shonibare is a truly exceptional artist and is an exemplary Art Icon. His vividly clothed figurative sculptures, the Hogarthian scenarios he creates as installations and photographs, and his beautiful films celebrate African culture while exposing the legacies of race and empire. Globally celebrated Shonibare also supports younger generations of artists in Britain and Africa; both his artistic legacy and his charitable initiatives will resonate for years to come.”
Iwona Blazwick
An online auction of artworks donated by leading contemporary artists will also take place, hosted by Phillips Auction on www.phillips.com. All funds raised will help support Whitechapel Gallery’s programme, in particular its work with thousands of children and young people each year.
The event committee includes Aki Abiola, Sir David Adjaye OBE, Dorota Audemars, Erin Bell, Terhas Berhe, David Cleaton-Roberts (Cristea Roberts Gallery), James and Jane Cohen, Robert Devereux, Karon Hepburn (Stephen Friedman Gallery), Luigi Maramotti, Bimpe Nkontchou, Oba Nsugbe, Irene Panagopoulos, Catherine Petitgas, Maria Sukkar, Nadja Swarovski, Andreas Teoh, Helen Waters (Cristea Roberts Gallery), and Cheyenne Westphal.
Shonibare is internationally renowned for his multi-layered work that explores issues of race, class and colonialism through his multi-disciplinary practice. Often incorporating references from Western art history and literature, his work questions the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. His signature material is the vibrantly coloured ‘Dutch wax’ batik fabric. Batik was inspired by Indonesian designs, manufactured in Holland and then sold to colonies in West Africa before becoming a signifier for African identity in the 1960s.
Shonibare was born in Lagos, Nigeria and lives and works in East London. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004. His sculpture, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was the 2010 Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square and is now on permanent display at The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. His monumental installation, The British Library (2014), which celebrates the contribution made by immigrants to Britain, has been on permanent display at Tate Modern since 2019. Recently, he has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, Singapore and London, and will have a major survey exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg in March 2021. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; James Cohan Gallery, New York; and Goodman Gallery, South Africa.
Over the past 10 years, Shonibare has supported a younger generation of artists through his pioneering ‘Guest Projects’, an initiative that gives free studio space to practitioners of any discipline for a month. He is the founder of the Yinka Shonibare Foundation, which aims to promote artistic and cultural exchange between Africa and the rest of the world through an ambitious programme of artist residencies in Nigeria from 2021.
The Swarovski Foundation has supported the Whitechapel Gallery Youth Programme since 2015 as part of its commitment to championing creativity, enabling art education and celebrating the power of art to transform lives. The Youth Programme has empowered over 4,000 young people by giving them opportunities to explore contemporary art, meet creative professionals and gain new skills and practical experience to open up career paths into the creative sector.
Previous recipients of the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon are: Sir Howard Hodgkin (2014), Richard Long (2015) Joan Jonas (2016), Peter Doig (2017) and Mona Hatoum (2018), Rachel Whiteread (2019) and Francis Alÿs (2020).
