Joy Labinjo

Joy Labinjo (born Dec 4, 1994) is a British-Nigerian artist whose painting practice explores family, race, memory, migration, and the social textures of Black life in Britain. Working across large-scale figurative painting, Labinjo examines identity, community, and belonging through vivid color, flattened perspective, patterned interiors, and compositions drawn from family photographs, found images, and historical archives.  Labinjo earned a BFA from Newcastle University in 2017 and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in 2022; she also spent a semester at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work often engages Black British history, domestic life, portraiture, and archival reconstruction, using collage-based preparatory processes and bold painterly form to consider how personal and collective histories shape the present.  Her work has been exhibited at Southwark Park Galleries, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Tiwani Contemporary, and through Art on the Underground in Brixton station. She won the Woon Art Prize in 2017, and her work is held in collections including the Toledo Museum of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Government Art Collection, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and MACAAL in Marrakech. Joy Labinjo lives and works in London.