Goodman Gallery presents Restitution of the Mind and Soul by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA. This exhibition of new quilts, masks and sculptures marks Shonibare’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Cape Town and his second exhibition with Goodman Gallery since bringing the iconic African Library to Johannesburg in 2018, which also marked the artist’s first show on the African Continent for fifteen years.
The premise for Shonibare’s exhibition four years ago, titled Ruins Decorated, rested on his belief that culture has evolved out of a process described by the artist as a “mongrelisation”.
Restitution of the Mind and Soul takes Shonibare’s enduring interest in the legacy of African aesthetics to the next level, responding to the fact that “the African contribution to modernism has never really been celebrated in the way it ought to be” (Shonibare).
The exhibition directly responds to Picasso’s collection of African artefacts, juxtaposing icons of classical European antiquity with these artefacts. Using Picasso’s collection as a starting point, these new works are a response to the widely acknowledged influence that African imagery had on major twentieth century artists and on entire western art movements, such as Cubism, Dada and Surrealism.
A series of vibrantly coloured, hand-stitched quilts illustrate African artefacts, which formed part of the private collections of influential modernist artists such as Matisse and Derain. Classical European sculptures of goddesses drawn from Greek and Roman mythology are hand-painted with Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax batik patterns, their heads replaced with replicas of African masks complimentary to the figure’s associated myths. Each mask has been drawn from a prominent twentieth century artist’s collection.
A further set of intricate, hand-painted masks appear alongside a slide projection, titled Paris á Noir II (2022), which presents historical archive material that conveys the fashion of African art and cultures in 1920-30s Paris. The work exposes the conflicted relationships between ‘western’ and ‘tribal’, appropriation and admiration.
According to Shonibare, “Paris of the early 20th century was hungry for the energy and culture of African communities, informing the nightlife, intellectual and literary scene, art, dance design and politics. It became a European centre for Black culture, fluctuating between facilitating black empowerment and reinforcing the fetishisation of African cultures by the mostly white bourgeois elite.”
A brief look at the impact of African aesthetics on key western artists from this era shows the pervasive nature of this influence. Georges Braque, André Derain and Amedeo Modigliani all collected artefacts from the African continent. Matisse collected African masks and sculptures extensively, including a Congolese Vili figure purchased at a Curio shop. He travelled to Algeria in 1906, inspiring his 1907 painting Blue Nude and where he studied African art. His studio was adorned with Kuba cloth from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo and incorporated the cloth’s patterns into his work. In reference to these cloths, Matisse remarked: “I never tire of looking at them [...] and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry”. Matisse is also reported to have brought an African mask to one of Gertrude Stein’s famous salons, which marked Picasso’s first “up-close” encounter.
Artworks
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Derain visited ethnographic collections in Paris and London and had African masks and sculptures in his personal collection. Man Ray’s introduction to African art was at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York for a show of African sculpture called Statuary in Wood by African Savages (1914). The Dada performer and poet, Tristan Tzara was a committed collector of African and Oceanic art and helped to organise the exhibition Art African et Art Océanien (1930) at Théatre Pigalle in Paris, which consisted of 425 objects from Africa and Oceania. Picasso, Derain, Braque, Joan Miró, Paul Guillaume and Félix Fénéon all lent objects for the exhibition.
Restitution of the Mind and Soul addresses this pervasive, one-sided cultural appropriation of African artefacts by subjecting European aesthetics to processes of appropriation that results in a multi-layered cross-cultural hybridity:
“I want to challenge notions of cultural authenticity, by creating a composite ideology, ‘a third myth’, exploring appropriation, cultural identity, and the ability to transform beyond what is expected and therefore compels us to contemplate our world differently” - Shonibare.
Artist Bio
Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962, London, United Kingdom) studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1989) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1991). His interdisciplinary practice uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.
In 2024, Serpentine Gallery, London UK, presented a solo exhibition of works in their Serpentine South gallery titled Suspended States. Shonibare’s work is also featured at the Venice Biennale 2024 as part of the Nigerian Pavilion, in the group show, 'Nigeria Imaginary.'
To mark Sharjah Biennial’s 30th anniversary in February 2023, Shonibare was commissioned to create a series of new works for the exhibition. He also unveiled a new outdoor sculpture commissioned by the David Oluwale Memorial Association in Aire Park, Leeds as part of Leeds 2023.
In November 2022, Shonibare hosted the international launch of Guest Artists Space (G. A. S.) Foundation, a non-profit founded and developed by the artist. The Foundation is dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange through residencies, public programmes and exhibition opportunities for creative practitioners from around the world. The live/work residency spaces are set across sites in Lagos and a rural working farm in Ijebu, Ogun State.
A major retrospective of his work opened at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in the same year followed by his co-ordination of The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London which opened in September 2021. The survey solo exhibition, Yinka Shonibare CBE: Planets in My Head, opened in April 2022 at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan followed by the unveiling in June 2022 of a major new sculptural work, Wind Sculpture in Bronze I at Royal Djurgården, Stockholm.
In 2013, he was elected a Royal Academician and was awarded the honour of ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2019. His installation ‘The British Library’ was acquired by Tate in 2019 and is currently on display at Tate Modern, London. Shonibare was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award in 2021.
In 2010, his first public art commission, ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and is in the permanent collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. In 2008, his mid-career survey began at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, travelling in 2009 to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Notable museum collections include: the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and VandenBroek Foundation, The Netherlands.
Shonibare lives and works in London, United Kingdom.
