Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1994 Dagenham, Essex

Biography

Painter Joy Labinjo was born to Nigerian parents in Dagenham, England in 1994, where she spent her early years. The family later moved to Stevenage in Hertfordshire, which was more ethnically diverse, and here she discovered a passion for art at secondary school. Labinjo completed her BFA at the University of Newcastle in 2017, which included a semester abroad at The University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, followed by her MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, which she pursued from 2020 to 2022. Influenced by her own experiences with racism and a Eurocentric art history education, Labinjo wrote her dissertation on the 1980s British Black art movement, taking inspiration from artists such as Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney.

While Labinjo's oeuvre primarily consists of large-scale paintings, her methodology often includes starting with photocollage to form a composition. She produces both figurative and abstract pieces. Her practice is characterised by vivid colours, flat perspectives, and bold brushstrokes, which give her compositions energy. and an emphasis on pattern creation. She draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including old family photos, archives, found images, and Instagram posts, to create new settings in her paintings. Blackness, community, family, history, identity and politics are some of the major themes in her work. ‘Rich with textures and patterns of the artist’s British-Nigerian heritage, they recall the pride and purpose of traditions carried from one country to another in movements of migration and diaspora,’ (Bonsu, 2022, p. 118). Her initial body of work centered around Black figures in everyday situations, but later expanded to include different races. This approach allowed her to capture intimate narratives, weaving together the personal and the collective in works such as: Breakfast with Violet (2020) and Jenny and Louis which continued her exploration of everyday situations, albeit with a broader racial scope. Amid the backdrop of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, she again shifted her perspective to thematically underscore the Black experience. Large-scale oils on canvas such as Enough is Enough (2020), The real thugs of Britain (2020) and We Don't See Colour, We Don't See You (2020) were direct painterly responses to societal upheavals. Labinjo observed: ‘These works were made in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and explore aspects of racism and colonialism in Britain. […] Though my previous paintings had been painted in the present, they weren't necessarily rooted in the present because they were based on photographs and archives from years ago,’ (Labinjo quoted in Trigg, 2021).

Labinjo has exhibited domestically and internationally. Her career took a leap forward in 2018 with her first solo exhibition at the Tiwani Contemporary gallery in London. Evocatively titled Recollections, the exhibits exemplified her approach of producing paintings via photographs from family photo albums. In the 2019 solo exhibition Joy Labinjo: Our histories cling to us at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, she took inspiration from the Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, to explore themes of family and identity heritage. Labinjo’s first public commission was in 2021 with the Art on the Underground initiative. 5 More Minutes was displayed at Brixton station, showing a hair salon and drawing the travellers’ attention the importance of these establishments in Black British female culture. Her solo exhibition Ode to Olaudah Equiano was held at the Chapter Gallery in Cardiff in 2022, taking as a discussion starting point the eponymous Black British spokesperson for the 18th century black community. That same year she had a solo exhibition Full Ground at Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos, Nigeria, where she exhibited nude-self-portraits. This decision was a rebellion against controlling female physical appearance in her country of origin. ‘I know it’s for my own protection’, Labinjo stated, ‘that people will tell me to cover up, but it just feels very patriarchal; the nudes were a chance for me to show myself on my own terms,’ (Labinjo quoted in Alemoru, 2022). In 2023 she took part in the West African international art fair ART X Lagos. One of her featured paintings was a reworking of the 18th century portrait of Christiaan van Molhoop - the black domestic servant of Baron Nagell, the Dutch ambassador in Britain - by the British painter Ozias Humphry. In the same year, her work was included in the major survey, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, held at Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town (2023)

Labinjo has been the recipient of several prizes, including the Woon Foundation Prize in 2017. In 2020, she undertook a residency at the Breeder Open Studio in Athens, Greece. Joy Labinjo lives and works in London, England. Her works are held in UK public collections including the Government Art Collection.