Modern Magic is a portfolio of 5 original prints by British artist Yinka Shonibare CBE. He was born in London in 1962 and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study art first at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then at Goldsmiths College, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts.

Shonibare’s work explores themes of race and class, using the media of painting, sculpture, photography and film. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and awarded an MBE.

In September 2008, a major mid-career survey exhibition began at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and was subsequently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. In 2010, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, became his first public artwork. The work is now on permanent display outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich Park, London. In 2013, Shonibare was elected Royal Academician. A permanent public installation of a wind sculpture in Howick Place, London, was unveiled in 2014. Other wind sculptures have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., in Central Park, New York, and in Lagos as part of the British Council UK/Nigeria 2015-16. In 2013, he was elected Royal Academician and received the honorary title 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 view at Tate Modern in London.

In 2020, Yinka Shonibare was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award. A major retrospective of his work opened at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg in May 2021, followed by the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition he coordinated in 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 of a major new sculptural work, Wind Sculpture in Bronze I, in June at Royal Djurgården, Stockholm.

Shonibare’s works have been exhibited around the world and are in museum collections such as the Tate in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Arts Council Collection in London, the National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and the VandenBroek Foundation in the Netherlands.

Current Yinka Shonibare exhibition: Trace – Formations of Likeness. Photography and Video from The Walther Collection, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 14 April – 23 July 2023.

Yinka Shonibare among artists selected for Nigeria’s Venice Biennale 2024 pavilion.