HOLD will run at Swindon Hub from Tuesday 6 October to Saturday 31 October, featuring six large-scale acrylic paintings created in Wiltshire during 2025 and 2026.
The exhibition marks the first time Sholanke has publicly presented a sustained collection of his work.
His paintings explore the human head not primarily as a portrait or likeness, but as a structure around which each piece is constructed.
The six works vary significantly in size, from the 60cm by 42cm Confluence 1/2026 to three paintings measuring 150cm by 100cm.
Rather than displaying the works simply as individual pieces, HOLD has been designed to take visitors through a sequence.
The paintings will be presented within a six-sided horseshoe-shaped space at the town centre venue, moving through what Sholanke describes as “compression to rupture to organic release to synthesis”.
Different colours are used throughout the sections to create contrasting psychological atmospheres.
Sholanke said his paintings begin with the head as an “armature”, or structural scaffold, rather than with a face.
He said:
“The head provides the internal architecture: the bilateral symmetry, the vertical axis, the distribution of weight across the picture plane.
“What accumulates on and around that structure is the investigation itself. Pressure. Retention. The redistribution of forces across a surface that refuses to settle.”
The collection broadly moves between two colour worlds.
Sholanke describes the blues as “interior, pressurised, nocturnal”, while greens and ochres represent something more “corporeal, terrestrial, alive”.
His work also responds to a modern world in which faces are routinely photographed, shared and digitally analysed.
He said:
“We live in a moment when the human face has been simultaneously multiplied beyond meaning and reduced to data.
“These paintings do not illustrate that condition. They embody it – making the instability of looking felt rather than understood.”
Sholanke is based in Wiltshire and predominantly creates large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas.
His wider body of work currently consists of 18 canvases, with the six pieces selected for HOLD forming his first public exhibition.
The exhibition will be hosted at Swindon Hub, placing the work in a community venue in the heart of the town rather than a traditional dedicated gallery.
Sholanke added: “These are not conclusions. They are findings from an investigation that continues.”
HOLD by Idowu Sholanke runs at Swindon Hub from Tuesday 6 October until Saturday 31 October.
