Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Yinka Shonibare MBE’s fifth exhibition Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall. “Theatricality is certainly a device in my work, it is a way of setting the stage...There is no obligation to truth in such a setting so you have the leeway to create fiction or to dream.” - Yinka Shonibare.
The earliest known documentation of a fatal car crash provides a pictorial metaphor for the new body of photographic and sculptural work included in this exhibition. Photographed in 1898, ‘The First Fatal Car Crash’ records death as a spectacle for the first time. A curious crowd surrounds the carcass of a motor vehicle, its once powerful form now lying redundant in a heap in this haunting image. Over a century later, Shonibare creates a similar scene of destruction in a sculptural dramatisation of the death of Arthur Miller’s infamous protagonist, salesman Willy Loman.
Working from a series of etchings of Dante’s Inferno made by Gustave Doré in 1861, Shonibare has situated Lowman in a photographic re-imagining of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. These stark and confrontational tableaux pose the question; where would Loman be found in this symbolic afterlife?’ Inspired by 20th century history paintings these large-scale works present the crowd of humanity as a surging mass of bodies, though here the crowd is anonymous and naked. Typical of Shonibare’s previous enquiries into a wide range of historical sources, timescales are collapsed and narratives are distorted in these commanding works.
This exhibition also marks a development into a new medium for the artist; the Climate Shit, drawings are a new body of work on paper created over the last year. Part stream of consciousness, part collage, these drawings convey an immediacy as the artist responds to the turbulence documented in the media alongside his own daily experiences. Hand written text, line drawing, gold leaf and collage collide to create kaleidoscopic compositions. Airplanes hover above a dizzying landscape of wind turbines, economic graphs and news of rising oil prices. The contrasting delicacy of sensuous gold foil and batik flowers suggests the collision of economic, aesthetic and personal realms.