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Lot Essay
Three police officers loom large against a yellow background in Joy Labinjo’s The Real Thugs of Britain (2020). Channelling Lucian Freud, their faces seem to moult and melt, an odious transformation befitting their status as boors and bullies. Included in Labinjo's solo exhibition The Elephant in the Room at The Breeder, Athens, shortly after its creation, The Real Thugs of Britain belongs to a series which marked her first response to the Black Lives Matter protests, drawing on photographs of protestors, police officers and businessmen. Though her works typically focus on Black figures, Labinjo began to paint white people in the wake of the demonstrations, using them as vehicles ‘to talk about racism as a structure’ (J. Labinjo, quoted in K. Morris, ‘Joy Labinjo: "When I’m painting I feel happy and alive"', The Guardian, 1 November 2020). At the front of the present work, notably, is Cressida Dick, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Born in Dagenham, Labinjo initially gained critical acclaim for her bold, colourful portraits of family members, both present and past. Initially, she painted from photographs, a method she adopted as an undergraduate at Newcastle when she realised the overwhelming absence of Black people in the university’s community. After her 2019 solo exhibition at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Labinjo had planned to step away from this type of portrait, but—exhausted and furious in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and other racial attacks—she reoriented her focus. ‘These works both poke fun at the absurdity of commonly held assumptions and the prejudices bound up in idioms and language which define certain perceptions I’m keen to explore', she explains. 'They are slightly unnerving and uncomfortable as I feel that’s an apt reflection of the situation we all collectively find ourselves in. Despite the events and conversations of last summer, there is continued disbelief and mockery when the lived experiences of Black people in Britain are shared. I wanted to exercise my imagination, sense of humour, and push my own boundaries. It was an overwhelming sense of "if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry".'
Born in Dagenham, Labinjo initially gained critical acclaim for her bold, colourful portraits of family members, both present and past. Initially, she painted from photographs, a method she adopted as an undergraduate at Newcastle when she realised the overwhelming absence of Black people in the university’s community. After her 2019 solo exhibition at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Labinjo had planned to step away from this type of portrait, but—exhausted and furious in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and other racial attacks—she reoriented her focus. ‘These works both poke fun at the absurdity of commonly held assumptions and the prejudices bound up in idioms and language which define certain perceptions I’m keen to explore', she explains. 'They are slightly unnerving and uncomfortable as I feel that’s an apt reflection of the situation we all collectively find ourselves in. Despite the events and conversations of last summer, there is continued disbelief and mockery when the lived experiences of Black people in Britain are shared. I wanted to exercise my imagination, sense of humour, and push my own boundaries. It was an overwhelming sense of "if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry".'