La Méduse

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Yinka Shonibare was born in England and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He returned to London to attend art school when he was 17. Encouraged to explore his personal experience, Shonibare began directing his art to comment on colonial and post-colonial relationships between Europe and Africa.The artist addresses issues pertaining to race and class in powerful paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and performances. 'La Méduse' pictures a model the artist constructed of a battered frigate perilously afloat on a stormy sea. Its title is taken from a ship carrying French officials that was wrecked en route to Senegal in 1819. Shonibare often makes allusions to famous 18th- and 19th-century European art, here Theodore Gericault’s iconic French Romantic painting The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts the appalling conditions that the survivors encountered.

Keywords

Boat
Sea
Sculpture
Patterned
Color
England
Africa