Tiwani Contemporary announces Joy Labinjo: Beloved, Take What You Need, its inaugural exhibition at its new 24 Cork Street, Mayfair gallery. This new body of work focuses on everyday Black life, and reflects the personal and professional changes Labinjo has been through in the five years since Tiwani Contemporary first presented her work.

Featuring intimate scenes, and exploring themes of love, relationships, and family dynamics, Labinjo’s large-scale figurative paintings present fresh and arresting compositions of colour and explore multiple modes of representation including abstraction, naturalism, and flatness. Drawing inspiration from found images and her own personal photographs, the suite of paintings demonstrate Joy Labinjo’s maturing practice.

The subjects of these paintings, both real and imagined, are lively groups of friends and family at leisure, enjoying the simple pleasure of being in each other’s company. Together, the paintings explore the experience of communing: From a group of men at a barbershop, to children playing together, to friends swimming in nature. While the paintings depict a range of disparate scenarios, the subject matter is unified by each individual painting’s relationship to the exhibition’s title, and the artist’s practice of working on several paintings at the same time. For Labinjo, the paintings she is drawn to when she gets to the studio each day reflect what she instinctively needs to nourish her at that moment in time and the kind of intimacy she is craving. Beloved, Take What You Need is Labinjo speaking to herself, and to anyone that feels the same as she.

Joy Labinjo: Beloved, Take What You Need is the debut exhibition at Tiwani Contemporary’s new London gallery. Designed by Matheson Whiteley architectural studio (London), with furnishings by designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello (Lagos), the gallery is located on the ground floor corner of Burlington Gate, Cork Street, a recently completed mixed-use building by renowned architect Richard Rogers. On Thursday 12 October, Cork Street will come alive as Tiwani Contemporary, along with neighbouring galleries at the heart of London’s art world, throws open its doors for a joint party celebrating Frieze week.

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