To have an exhibition of this calibre on Newbury’s doorstep is a rare privilege

Ritual Ecstasy of the Modern: prints by Yinka Shonibare at The Base at Greenham

Review by LIN WILKINSON

Pictures by PHIL CANNINGS (except artist’s portrait).

This print exhibition by pre-eminent contemporary artist and Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare, direct from Cristea Roberts Gallery in London, is a coup for The Base.

The Gallery is alive with large, brilliantly coloured screenprints and woodcuts. Framed in white and hung on black screens, the colour radiates out, and the ample hanging has allowed each piece to speak. The central area has been completely opened up, so the works are also in dialogue with each other.

It’s so good to see work that deals with ideas and issues, here colonialism and its aftermath, race, class, cultural identity, political and economic histories, and especially the difficult and prickly ongoing relationships between the colonisers and the once colonised. Shonibare, a self-styled ‘post-colonial hybrid’ is testament to that complex relationship between Africa and Europe.

It’s a visually stunning show, so can also be enjoyed solely for its creativity and chromatic joy. Exuberant colour is allied to bold, simplified, strongly outlined forms. Fabric collaged elements are included, in vibrant, vernacular African designs.

The works have a ‘jigsaw quality’, confirmed by a series of short videos showing the process of woodblock printing, and there’s a graphic, poster-like quality to the pieces, a boldness and a sense of physicality. The forms leap out. Though the messages are powerful, the work questions rather than hectors.

As you enter the gallery, two sumptuous fabric works announce two of the series. The intricate, dense, detailed African patterning signals the work within.

Here modernism meets and interacts with African history and identity, Shonibare’s own life and education reflecting this. Born in London, he went to Nigeria as a child, but trained in fine art in in London, where he now works.

His Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was part of the Fourth Plinth programme in Trafalgar Square, and, in 2010, was the first commission from a black British artist. Here, Mayflower, All Flowers is a comment on the first wave of white emigration to the USA, the ship’s sails, in traditional African fabric, referencing the slave trade.

African masks and artefacts were a huge influence on modernist Western artists, most notably Picasso. Modern Magic is a series of six vibrant, intensely patterned relief prints that take as their starting point and motifs, masks in Picasso’s collection. The ‘Modern Spiritual’ series works from objects owned by other artists.

In each work in the African Bird Magic series, a huge, iconic bird is the dominating compositional element.

American cultural colonisation is referenced in three ‘Cowboy Angel’ prints, in which archetypal cowboy figures and fragments of newsprint bearing stock market prices, are framed with African carved heads and masks. The ‘Twins’ series seems to reference nineteenth-century white emigration to Africa.

To have an exhibition of this calibre on our doorstep is a rare privilege. Beat a path to its door.

LIN WILKINSON

The show runs until Sunday, February 23 (open Tues-Sun 10am-4pm). Full price £8.25 (concessions). Book a time slot.