For nearly a decade, Yinka Ilori has been known as an artist of colour and community — the designer behind playful, technicolour public interventions across London and beyond. But his first solo gallery show, Joy Through Resistance: He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best, at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London, reveals something more personal: a meditation on grief, migration, and inherited hope. The exhibition runs until July 11.

Born in 1987 to Nigerian and Ghanaian parents and raised on Essex Road in north London, Ilori has spent his career translating Nigerian storytelling traditions into playgrounds, murals, furniture, and large-scale public commissions — work that has shaped how contemporary British design thinks about joy, colour, and civic space. Joy Through Resistance marks his first solo gallery exhibition in his home city, bringing together more than 20 works across painting, printmaking, sculpture, and sound.

It is, by his own description, his most personal body of work yet. The show was shaped in the wake of losing his mother two years ago, and its title comes directly from something she used to tell him and his siblings during hard times: that whatever difficulty you're facing, joy waits on the other side of it. Ilori has said the phrase wasn't meant bitterly — it was about endurance and hope, a way of carrying pride through hardship rather than escaping it.

Two recurring bodies of work anchor the exhibition's visual language. Paradise for All (2024), a series of six screenprints, uses bold colour and geometric structure, while the newer An Abundance of Flowers Blessed by Us, For Us (2026) leans into a broader, shared spirituality. Throughout, Ilori layers the Nigerian yellow trumpet flower over the British daffodil and ornamental lace — a visual shorthand, in his words, for turning hardship into strength and locating a "quiet resistance" within diasporic tradition.

The show extends past the visual with sculptural elements — handmade congas, a custom shekere, a drum kit — wrapped in lace, setting up a deliberate tension between fragility and weight. A sound installation deepens the effect: composer Peter Adjaye contributes a three-part piece built around horns and brass, while a second work layers field recordings, Yoruba lullabies, church music, and archival material with Nigerian horn samples. Together they turn the gallery into something closer to a gathering space, or a place of worship, than a traditional white cube.

The exhibition arrives alongside a broader shift in Ilori's practice. He recently launched the Yinka Ilori Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to building permanent community play spaces — its first flagship site is set to open in Nigeria, co-designed with local residents and paired with a year of free cultural and skills programming. It's a natural extension of ideas he's explored for years in public commissions, from playground-inspired installations to collaborations with brands like The North Face and Rapha, and institutions including the Design Museum, the Royal Academy, and the Saatchi Gallery.

Yinka Ilori: Joy Through Resistance, He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best is on view at Cristea Roberts Gallery, 43 Pall Mall, London, through July 11.

Follow the artist and gallery: @yinka_ilori · @cristearoberts