Yinka Shonibare reimagines a Gainsborough at the National Gallery, 15 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. Admission is free.
Yinka Shonibare was born in Abuja in 1962, moved to Lagos at three and to London at seventeen, and has spent his career on the joke inside a fabric. The brightly coloured Dutch wax cloth that reads as African is Indonesian in origin, Dutch in manufacture and sold into West Africa by colonial traders — so a headless mannequin in an eighteenth-century English gown cut from it carries the whole argument about who made whom without a word of explanation. He came up with the Young British Artists, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, put Nelson’s ship in a bottle on the fourth plinth, and is a Royal Academician.
Thomas Gainsborough painted the English gentry at exactly the moment the money for those gowns was coming from the plantations, and painted them very beautifully, which is the tension the National Gallery is putting in one room. The Gallery has been putting living artists beside its collection for a decade, and this is the sharpest of those pairings so far, because the two bodies of work are about the same money.
Shonibare sets new work against Gainsborough there from Thursday 15 October 2026 to Sunday 7 February 2027. Admission is free, and it runs alongside the ticketed Renoir for most of its length — the free show being the one with the argument in it.