Exhibition
Joshua Donkor: I have more souls than one
18 Jan-5 May 2025
The Holburne Museum
Bath BA2 4DB
Overview
The Holburne is pleased to present a display of recent works by Joshua Donkor (b. 1997, UK), a Ghanian-British painter who grew up in Bath.
His work is deeply personal, using portraiture to reflect family history, identities and experiences, exploring how feelings of belonging and estrangement play out through different generations.
Donkor approaches portraiture as a collaborative exercise between him and his sitters. He works with the subjects of his paintings to identify objects and images that convey their personal narrative, including family photos, fabrics and personal belongings.
Using a range of different painting and printing techniques, he literally embeds the histories of his sitters into the work, combining their image with layered visual references to the items they picked out together. The images are built up with glimpses of the figure’s homes and families: two crucial elements that inform identity. The resulting works are complex representations of multiple generations, time periods and memories that have informed the past, and continue to influence the future.
