Yinka Shonibare and the narrative power of his iconic series

From the AD HOC NEWS Art Desk » Work Series & Retrospective Desk - The editors cover exhibitions, auctions, collections, prizes and artistic positions. Published: June 27, 2026 · Last checked: June 27, 2026, 9:14 PM

Yinka Shonibare has built one of the most recognizable visual vocabularies in contemporary art with his staged tableaux, headless mannequins and vivid so-called Dutch wax fabrics. His major series, from Diary of a Victorian Dandy to The Swing (after Fragonard), compress histories of empire, race and class into carefully choreographed scenes.

Key work series by Yinka Shonibare

One of Yinka Shonibare’s earliest widely known cycles, Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), consists of staged photographic tableaux loosely based on William Hogarth’s moral narrative paintings, with the artist himself performing a dandy moving through aristocratic interiors.

The photographic series was originally commissioned for London Underground’s Art on the Underground program and appeared on billboards across the city, bringing Shonibare’s reworking of British social history into everyday public space.

Another pivotal work, the sculptural installation The Swing (after Fragonard) (2001), translates Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 18th century Rococo painting into three dimensions, with a life-size female figure on a swing rendered as a headless mannequin dressed in vivid wax print fabrics.

The National Gallery in London has highlighted how this work reimagines a canonical French painting through the lens of colonial trade and textile histories, since the wax prints cited by Shonibare were developed in Europe and exported to West Africa.

How the series revisit art history

Across these series, Shonibare repeatedly revisits European art-historical motifs and genres, including the Rococo, history painting and portraiture, and restages them with Black protagonists and hybrid costuming to expose the colonial entanglements of European leisure and luxury.

In Diary of a Victorian Dandy, for instance, the central character, played by the artist, moves through scenes of debauchery and social performance in lavish Victorian interiors, while his Black presence and dandy persona unsettle conventions of class and race in that period imagery.

The role of Dutch wax textiles

Central to Shonibare’s work series is his use of brightly colored so-called Dutch wax textiles, industrially produced fabrics associated with West Africa but historically developed in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, themselves adapted from Indonesian batik.

The artist has described these fabrics as a signifier of postcolonial identity precisely because of their hybrid origin, using them to dress mannequins and protagonists who complicate fixed ideas of African or European authenticity.

How the artist builds his tableaux

Shonibare often works with a large studio team to design costumes, sets and photographic compositions, drawing on research into period interiors, fashion history and colonial trade routes in order to embed historical detail into visually seductive scenes.

Many of the sculptural series use headless mannequins, a decision the artist has linked to the history of the French Revolution and the guillotine, but also to a refusal to fix identity to specific facial features or individual portraits.

Where the artist stands now

Yinka Shonibare’s established series continue to circulate in major institutional exhibitions worldwide, and his studio practice remains focused on expanding these narrative constellations of colonial and postcolonial history through new sculptural and photographic ensembles.

This article was produced with a.i. support and editorially reviewed. All statements without guarantee; auction results, exhibition dates and awards may change at short notice.