Exhibition Preview: Between Homes – Josh Wentz Explores Migration, Connection And Belonging At Gallery 1889
Leaving a place can be easier to describe than the feeling that follows. Familiar surroundings disappear, routines loosen, and the question of where we belong becomes unexpectedly difficult to answer. For artist Josh Wentz, that unsettled territory provides the starting point for The Journey, his forthcoming solo exhibition at Toxteth’s Gallery 1889.
Bringing together imagery of migratory birds and portraits of people within the Bridge2 community, the exhibition considers movement, displacement and the search for home. Wentz approaches these subjects through personal experience, exploring the uncertainty of living between places and the connections that might give such a life its shape.
His route into painting has itself involved considerable change. After previous careers in engineering and church ministry in Turkey, Wentz began exploring art seriously during the pandemic. His work has since entered private collections across the United States, Turkey, Canada, Norway and the United Kingdom. Recent group exhibitions include From Lines to Layers at Liverpool’s Editions Gallery and Liver Uncovered at The Amorous Cat Gallery. This exhibition also marks a return to Gallery 1889, where he participated in Leaf in 2024.
At the centre of his practice sits a belief that creativity can bring people into closer understanding. Differences in language, appearance, experience and conviction can create distance; looking at art together offers an opportunity to move across it.
“Making, seeing, and trying to understand art together is one of the fastest paths to finding the things we share,” he concludes.
That collaborative understanding gives The Journey a particular resonance within Gallery 1889. Based at Bridge2 on Windsor Street, the community gallery forms part of a wider organisation supporting refugees, asylum seekers and local residents. The relationship between exhibition and setting feels especially pertinent when the people who use that space also become its subjects.
Portraits of Bridge2 students and volunteers bring individual faces into the exhibition’s exploration of migration. Alongside them, birds in flight offer another way of considering the experience of departure: the loss of solid ground, the necessity of movement, and the possibility of finding direction before reaching a destination.
Wentz’s interest extends beyond outward likeness. “In my work I look for the visual tracks left by human spiritual connection: with the world, with each other, and with the divine,” he explains. Portraiture and figurative work become ways of approaching relationships that cannot always be readily seen.
His recent work in oils and pastels reflects what he describes as “the experience of uprootedness and the desire to identify a home while leading a life between homes”. That tension gives the exhibition its most compelling question: how do we recognise home when our lives no longer fit comfortably within a single place?
For Liverpool audiences, The Journey offers an opportunity to consider that question through both symbolic imagery and the people of a local community. In a city shaped by arrivals and departures, its exploration of belonging should find an attentive audience.
The Journey opens at Gallery 1889, 36 Windsor Street, Toxteth, on 20 November 2026. Entry is free.
