Joy Labinjo

Labinjo won the Woon art prize, which awarded her a 12-month residency at Baltic29 and £20,000,[9][11][10] At the end of her BFA at Newcastle University in 2017, she was offered representation by Tiwani Contemporary in London, which now (2022) continues to represent her.[10]

Labinjo gained attention for her paintings depicting Black figures in day-to-day situations, inspired by old family photos.[4] Her initial process of collage uses everything from old family photos to Instagram posts in order to create compositions and new environments for her paintings, known for their vivid colors, interesting patterns, flattened perspective, and bold brushstrokes.[7][5][9]

In 2018, Labinjo presented her first solo exhibition, Recollections, at the Tiwani Contemporary gallery, of works inspired by family photos.[12] Pieces such as The Elders, Visiting Great Grandma and Untitled (a portrait of a younger version of Labinjo and her aunt) were exhibited.[12][11] Untitled sold for £69,300.[11] In the same year, Labinjo started working in a studio in Brixton.[13]

In October 2019, Tiwani Contemporary dedicated their booth at the Frieze Art Fair in London to Labinjo and her work.[9][14][7] Labinjo received much attention at the fair due to three of her pieces being sold within the first couple of hours.[3][14] In the same month, Joy Labinjo: Our histories cling to us, her first major solo institutional show, opened at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. With a title from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this included works with similar themes and subject matter to those of her previous works. The exhibition closed in February 2020.[5] In November 2019, Labinjo presented her work for the first time in Nigeria at the international art fair ART X Lagos.[9]

Labinjo used her old family photos as the sole inspiration and subject for her work for almost three years.[9] After her exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in 2019, she decided to step away from those photos to create more variety in her work and paint people of different races.[3] In this period she created works such Breakfast with Violet and Adam and Jenny and Louis, both depictions of white figures in everyday situations, similar to her work in the past.[3][15] However, with the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests happening at the height of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, she continued creating work that highlighted and discussed the black experience but now had themes dealing with racism and political commentary.[3] Pieces such as Enough is Enough, The real thugs of Britain, Africa, and We Don't See Colour, We Don't See You, show her response to the Black Lives Matter protests, hoping that these paintings would spark conversations of race and the origins of the United Kingdom within the country.[8][15][7] In September 2020, she started a residency at the Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece, where her solo exhibition The Elephant in the Room opened, containing her works, such as the previously mentioned, which dealt with more political and social commentary.[16]

In October 2020 Labinjo started her MFA at the University of Oxford, and in December of the same year Tiwani Contemporary presented another exhibition of her work for Art Basel Miami Beach OVR, the first time Labinjo presented work in the United States.[17] The work focused on Black British historical figures, most notably a portrait of Sara Forbes Bonetta, the Egbado princess sold into slavery who later became Queen Victoria's goddaughter.[15]

In 2021 Labinjo received a commission for her first public work from Art on the Underground.[13] She created the piece 5 More Minutes for the underground station in Brixton, where her studio is located.[8] Her largest painting to date depicts a scene of a Black hair salon and is reflects the community in the area as well as being an homage to these spaces.[8] It gets its title from a phrase commonly heard in hair salons which Labinjo thought also worked perfectly for the underground station, which displayed the piece from November 2021 to November 2022.[8]

Throughout 2021 and 2022 Labinjo continued creating work inspired by politics and history, and even deeply personal pieces.[2] In February 2022 her exhibition Full Ground was the debut show of a branch of Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos.[18][19] It included a number of nude self-portraits as a response to how policed she felt over her body when visiting Nigeria.[2] In March of the same year she opened another exhibition in Wales.[18] Ode to Olaudah Equiano, opened at the Chapter Gallery and contained works that expanded upon her paintings of Black British historical figures done in 2020, this time primarily the abolitionists of the 18th century such as Olaudah Equiano.[20] The exhibition included works such as Ode to Olaudah Equiano, Olaudah Equiano, and Ignatius Sancho.[2]