[4][5] At the age of 18, he contracted transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, which resulted in a long-term physical disability where one side of his body is paralysed.

He was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at documenta XI in 2002 to create his most recognised work, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation, which launched him on the international stage.

[citation needed] In 2004, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his Double Dutch exhibition at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and for his solo show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Of the four nominees, he seemed to be the most popular with the general public that year, with a BBC website poll resulting in 64 per cent of voters stating that his work was their favourite.

[15] On 3 December 2016, one of Shonibare's "Wind Sculpture" pieces was installed in front of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art (NMAA) in Washington, DC.

Entitled Hibiscus Rising, it commemorates the life and death of David Oluwale, a Nigerian homeless man persecuted by Leeds City Police.

[19] Shonibare's work explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, and, more recently, film and performance.

[citation needed] Shonibare is well known for creating headless, life-size sculptural figures meticulously positioned and dressed in vibrant wax cloth patterns in order for history and racial identity to be made complex and difficult to read.

[23] In his 2003 artwork Scramble for Africa, Shonibare reconstructs the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when European leaders negotiated and arbitrarily divided the continent in order to claim African territories.

[24] By exploring colonialism, particularly in this tableaux piece, the purpose of the headless figurines implies the loss of humanity as Shonibare explains: "I wanted to represent these European leaders as mindless in their hunger for what the Belgian King Leopold II called 'a slice of this magnificent African cake.

Shonibare states: "When I was making it I was really thinking about American imperialism and the need in the West for resources such as oil and how this pre-empts the annexation of different parts of the world.

[31] An example of some of these recreations would be Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (1998)[32] and Reverend on Ice (2005)[33] (after The Rev Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch by Raeburn).

[20] Shonibare also takes carefully posed photographs and videos recreating famous British paintings or stories from literature but with himself taking centre stage as an alternative, black British dandy – for example, A Rake's Progress by Hogarth, which Shonibare translates into Diary of A Victorian Dandy (1998),[35] or his Dorian Gray (2001),[36] named after Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In 2011, the Art Fund launched a campaign and successfully raised money for the purchase and relocation of the sculpture to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where it found its new permanent home.

[citation needed] The Goodman Gallery announced in 2018 that the Norval Foundation, South Africa's newest art museum based in Cape Town, has made a permanent acquisition of Shonibare's Wind Sculpture (SG) III, making it a first for the African continent.