Artist Research Assignment: February 2015

Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander received her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 1991. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Sikander is a Pakistani-born, and internationally recognized artist. She started her pioneering practice taking up Indo-Persian miniature painting as a point of departure. She challenges the traditional formal and strict expressions of miniature painting as well as its medium-based restrictions. She experiments with scale and media; media includes animation, video, and mural in collaboration with other artists. Her ideas for her work are based of the examination of the forces at stake in contested cultural and political histories. Her work has helped launch a major re-finding for the love of the art in creating miniature painting. Also, her work has helped build prophets for the Miniature Painting department in the Nineties at the National College of Arts in Lahore, inspiring many others to examine the miniature tradition.
I enjoyed the paintings because of the medium f water color. I believe it gave the pictures a flowing movement within the pieces of art. I also enjoyed the colors.

Big Ritz

Untitled, 1998

The World is Yours, The World is Mine

Maligned Monsters

The last post

http://shahziasikander.com/paper/3.html

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare MBE RA was born in London, and at the age of three moved to Lagos, Nigeria. Later, he moved back to London to study Fine Art, first at Byam Shaw College of Art, and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA. He graduated as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta 10 in 2002, this led to his creation of his most recognized work ‘Gallantry and Criminal Conversation,’ this launched him into international fame. Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004, and awarded the decoration of Member of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”. This title has been added to his professional name, "MBE". In September 2008, his major mid-career survey commenced at the MCA Sydney and toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in June 2009, and then at the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in October 2009. 'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle', in 2010, became his first public art commission on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. In 2013 he was elected Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, also including "RA" in his professional name. Currently he is living and working in the East End of London. Over the past decade, Shonibare has become interested in colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation; his work expresses these issues. He also is inspired by the ideas of race and class. Through painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently film and performance, he expresses these influences that he strongly connects with. Using this wide range of techniques, Shonibare also examines the construction of identity, and the interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their economic and political histories. Through the use of Western art history and literature, he questions what constitutes our collective contemporary identity in today's world. He often describes himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid.
I really enjoyed the scultures done by Shonibare. Each sculpture is so unique and creative. I was attractd to his art by the use of bright colors and interesting visuals each sculpture permitted.