Joshua Perkin (b. 1990, Shuckburgh, England) is a British painter based in Catalonia. His work draws on years of travel and experience across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, translating fragments of these encounters into expansive, imagined worlds.
Rather than depicting particular locations, Perkin brings together landscapes, architecture, figures, animals and everyday objects from different cultural and historical contexts. These elements are transformed through memory and imagination, resulting in paintings that balance abstraction and representation while leaving their narratives deliberately open. Joshua's characters and settings resist clear identification, allowing contrasting ideas and emotions to coexist without a single fixed interpretation.
Perkin’s approach is deeply physical and rooted in the act of making. He builds his own frames, stretches his canvases and works on several paintings simultaneously, allowing each piece to develop through trial, repetition and discovery. Layered surfaces and spontaneous marks give the works a sense of movement, while traces of his surroundings emerge through colour, composition and recurring imagery.
His earlier work building skateparks worldwide became an important part of his visual research, later developed through an MA in Artistic Production and Research at the University of Barcelona. Today, Joshua continues to bring together lived experience, cultural exchange and imagination whlie creating ambiguous worlds where personal memory meets broader questions about human experience.