Joy Labinjo valuation
Paints Black British family life in big, flat, colourful compositions built from photographs and archives.
Joy Labinjo was born in Dagenham in 1994 to Nigerian parents and grew up there and in Stevenage.
What a work by Joy Labinjo is worth
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Bio
Joy Labinjo was born in Dagenham in 1994 to Nigerian parents and grew up there and in Stevenage. She studied fine art at Newcastle University, graduating in 2017, and her degree show of paintings made from old family photographs won the Woon Art Prize. In 2020 she began an MFA at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. Her paintings show Black British and Nigerian families and friends at parties, weddings and everyday moments, in flattened perspective and bright, simplified colour, assembled from family albums, found photographs and historical archives, and her research into the British Black Arts movement of the 1980s runs through her work. Her first solo exhibition, Recollections, was in London in 2018, and in 2021 she made 5 More Minutes, a large commission for Art on the Underground at Brixton station.
Her paintings have come to auction in recent years, sometimes soon after they were made, so provenance through her gallery and the history of any earlier sale are the first questions.
Dagenham, Newcastle and Brixton
Her painting An 18th-Century Family, from her first solo exhibition, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Paintings such as Ode to Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho take their subjects from Black British history.
Family albums, Baltic and Lagos
Labinjo builds each painting from a collage of photographs, from her family's albums to pictures found online, and the degree show she made that way in 2017 won the Woon Art Prize, with a year's residency through Baltic in Gateshead, and brought her representation by Tiwani Contemporary in London. In October 2019 Tiwani gave its Frieze London stand to her work, and that month her first institutional show, Our histories cling to us, its title taken from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, opened at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.
After 2019 her subjects widened. Paintings made in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were shown at The Breeder in Athens, a portrait of Sarah Forbes Bonetta was among the first of her works shown to American collectors, and Full Ground, with nude self-portraits made after visits to Nigeria, opened Tiwani's Lagos gallery in 2022.
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