REVIEW | Yinka Shonibare CBE: Ritual Ecstasy of the Modern – Cristea Roberts Gallery

Yinka Shonibare CBE: Ritual Ecstasy of the Modern marks the renowned artist’s first solo show with Cristea Roberts Gallery, showcasing an eclectic array of new woodblock prints and sculptures.

African masks and batik fabrics feature heavily in these works, signifying the complex colonial and post-colonial histories of the African diaspora in relation to the Western world. Batik fabrics, for example, were inspired by Indonesian design and mass-produced by the Dutch in the 1800s, which were then sold to the colonies in West Africa. Yet, nowadays, we see them as a symbol of African identity, unaware of its implicit irony. In his large woodblock prints, sections of the paper have been cut out so that the fabric could be collaged in its place.

The subject matter is diverse and impressively focused, unified by a multi-layered approach in which the African mask acts as a medium for reclaiming previously repressed and oppressed identities.

Cowboy Angels was Shonibare’s first significant print project, a paradoxical take on a symbol of American nationalism with a bit of humour thrown in as well; it coincided with the election of Donald Trump as President. For Unstructured Icons, he spotlights the European aristocracy’s indulgence in material wealth and exotic objects while slavery reached new heights in Africa. One can draw a parallel with his series of endangered bird prints, a commentary on Western industrialisation’s damaging effects to the environment.

Colonialism is addressed more directly in Mayflower, All Flowers, depicting the ship that brought English migrants (Pilgrims) to the so-called New World, establishing Plymouth Colony, the second permanent English colony in America. This print was created in response to Black Lives Matter in 2020 and originated from a rejected mural commission in Boston; they said his attempt to make a more inclusive version of the iconic American symbol would be too controversial.

Returning to the presence of African masks, Shonibare emphatically acknowledges their significance to the shaping of Western modernist art via artist-collectors like Picasso, Man Ray, André Derain, Constantin Brâncuși, Tristian Tzara, and Hannah Höch.

This is where his most recent print projects come into play, in Modern Magic, Modern Spiritual, and the African Roots of Modernism series of editioned mask sculptures hand-painted with batik designs. One such Gba Gba mask – originally carved to honour a prominent person’s beauty and skill in a community – is based on that used by Man Ray in the famous photograph Noire et Blanche, featuring Kiki de Montparnasse.