Room 1

A painted couple poses beside their land, while nearby sculptural figures repeat the pose without their heads. Room 1 brings Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews together with Yinka Shonibare’s Mr and Mrs Andrews without their Heads. Gainsborough’s portrait, made around 1750, presents a prosperous couple within an extensive country view. Shonibare’s work of 1998 removes their faces and replaces the painted dress with West African textiles. The familiar composition becomes a different kind of encounter when the land and painted setting fall away. Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist, uses that change to question the connections between wealth, identity and colonial exploitation. The missing heads also allude to the executions of the French Revolution. These are concerns raised through his reworking, rather than facts visible in the original portrait alone. Compare the clothing, poses and surrounding space in the two works. The temporary pairing gives one painting two historical viewpoints. It asks what a portrait chooses to display about its sitters and what another artist can make newly visible.