Congratulations to Yinka Shonibare CBE on the unveiling of Wind Sculpture in Bronze I, 2022, at the Princess Estelle Sculpture Garden in Stockholm. This monumental outdoor sculpture explores the notion of freezing a moment in time and sculpting the impossible--the motion of the wind. Throughout his career, Shonibare has made work that embodies concepts of contradiction and ambivalence as a way of interrogating our assumptions. This new work - made out a heavy material but resembling a weightless piece of cloth blowing in the wind - continues the exploration of this throughline in Shonibare's work. He challenges traditional ideas about identity as being more of a construct rather than a truth.
As Shonibare remarked about the work, his first Wind Sculpture made of bronze, "Looking at the history of sculpture and the history of bronze, bronze sculpture is essentially a Eurocentric material. I’m working in the tradition of bronze sculpture, but then turning that on its head. Can we make something that is not about heroic male figures, can we move away from the patriarchal imagery of bronze sculpture and challenge that with something which is much more exciting? That is what is interesting to me about the material."
Read more about the commission here.