Yinka Shonibare answers Thomas Gainsborough's plantation-era portraits with new work, the sharpest of the National Gallery's decade of living-artist pairings.
Yinka Shonibare, who put Nelson’s ship in a bottle on the fourth plinth, shows new work beside Thomas Gainsborough at The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, from Thursday 15 October 2026.
Shonibare was born in Abuja in 1962 and moved to Lagos at three and to London at seventeen. He came up with the Young British Artists, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and is a Royal Academician.
His work turns on Dutch wax cloth. The brightly coloured fabric that reads as African is Indonesian in origin, Dutch in manufacture and sold into West Africa by colonial traders. A headless mannequin in an eighteenth-century English gown cut from it carries the argument about who made whom without a word of explanation.
Gainsborough painted the English gentry at the moment the money for those gowns was coming from the plantations. The Gallery puts that tension in one room, the latest in a decade of pairings between its collection and a living artist.
Shonibare’s new work stays on show until Sunday 7 February 2027. It runs alongside the Renoir exhibition for most of its length.