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Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) was born in London, but lived in Lagos, Nigeria, between the ages of three and nineteen. Making art in various media—including paintings, sculpture, textiles, photography, and film—Shonibare regularly subverts familiar visual motifs and traditions in order to explore questions about class, race, and globalization. Party Boy is a digital print, with hand-decorated elements, made to accompany Progress, an exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London in 2014 that explored the legacy of William Hogarth. The silhouetted figure is derived from the third plate of William Hogarth’s popular series of engravings, A Rake’s Progress (1732–34), which depicts the drunken rake at a party, surrounded by prostitutes. Shonibare’s solitary rake, however, is black and is held aloft by balloons, decorated with the brightly colored batik fabric that appears throughout the artist’s oeuvre. This fabric, which incorporates Indonesian designs, was mass-produced by the Dutch, and sold to the colonies in West Africa, where it became a symbol of independence in the 1960s. Shonibare has noted, "People always want to categorize things: I’m much more interested in this idea of a hybrid."

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016