{"id":674608,"date":"2026-05-30T18:57:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/674608\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T18:57:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:57:30","slug":"michael-armitage-opens-the-door-to-his-studio-in-nairobi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/674608\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Armitage Opens the Door to His Studio in Nairobi"},"content":{"rendered":"

At once rooted in specific history and sliding into the fantastical, Michael Armitage\u2019s visionary paintings draw on the history, politics, mythology, and terrain of his native East Africa and Bali<\/a>, where the Kenyan British artist has been based since 2022. He has long had an interest in \u201cthe landscape as a character,\u201d he says, \u201cas a container of culture, belief, generations, the expressions of a people.\u201d <\/p>\n

The mountainous scene in 52,000 Years, a work Armitage completed last year, reflects the kind of tropical, verdant view he wakes up to in Bali. Only in this rendering, stylized wild pigs and antelope skitter across the canvas, hunted by little humanlike figures with ghostly halos\u2014a reference to ancient cave paintings recently discovered on the nearby Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Rising up in the foreground is a kaleidoscopic formation of human heads suspended in some kind of liminal otherworldly state.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Person<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe artist in his
\nstudio.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\u201cThe painting is about this relation to time,\u201d says Jean-Marie Gallais, curator at the Pinault Collection<\/a>, which has staged Armitage\u2019s largest survey to date, \u201cThe Promise of Change,\u201d at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice<\/a> through January 2027. \u201cWhat interests Michael is that the first known human figurative painting in the world is located in the Sulawesi cave.\u201d <\/p>\n

The exhibition, coinciding in part with the Venice Biennale<\/a>, includes 45 paintings and some 120 studies and works on paper made since 2014. Organized thematically, the show moves through different series, from paintings referencing contemporary affairs such as Kenya\u2019s 2017 elections and the migration and refugee crisis to works based on mythological figures such as Antigone and Warigia to recent landscapes.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Abstract<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMichael Armitage, Cave, (2021).
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: KERRY MCFATE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Three<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMichael Armitage, Don\u2019t Worry There Will Be More, (2024).
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: KERRY MCFATE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER <\/p>\n

\u201cBali is a visually overwhelming place to step into as a foreigner but also remarkably welcoming and open,\u201d says Armitage, who moved from England with his Indonesian wife to raise their daughter, now three. After finishing his art studies at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London<\/a>, he kept a studio in the city for more than a decade, splitting his time between there and Nairobi, Kenya, where he was born and raised. <\/p>\n

From a young age, Armitage wanted only to draw and paint, and he studied with an art teacher on weekends. As a preadolescent, he was introduced to the Kenyan art scene by his best friend\u2019s mother, sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg, who gave him a model for being an artist as a way of life. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Painting<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMichael Armitage, Raft (i), (2024).
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: KERRY MCFATE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Modern<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe lush landscape
\naround his studio in Kenya, a place that often influences his
\nwork.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Armitage still maintains a studio in Nairobi, where he founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute<\/a> to promote the art of East Africa in 2020. One recent exhibition grouped works that address the human condition by him and Van Rampelberg with drawings by the late Austrian artist Maria Lassnig<\/a>, an important influence on Armitage. Years of art school in London provided him with an immersion in Western art history, from how Paul C\u00e9zanne<\/a> laid down color to conceptual approaches. \u201cI always go back to Goya,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Person<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tArmitage in his studio with works in various states of progress.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

It was during a postgrad period of profound questioning about what and how to make art that Armitage began searching for a way \u201cfrom the beginning of the paintings to ground them in East Africa in this kind of sociopolitical and cultural space.\u201d A turning point came when, visiting a tourist market in Kenya, he discovered a piece of reddish-brown lubugo bark cloth, a traditional Ugandan textile used to wrap the dead for funeral rituals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe surface was quite rough and not what I was used to painting on,\u201d says Armitage, who began to experiment with stretching and priming this \u201csupercharged material\u201d like canvas and thinning down his paint so he could work more fluidly on the surface. \u201cIt really opened a door for me.\u201d <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Colorful<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMichael Armitage, Dandora (Xala, Musicians) (2022).
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: DAVID WESTWOOD, \u00a9 MICHAEL ARMITAGE AND WHITE CUBE<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Abstract<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMichael Armitage Untitled (2024).
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto: KERRY MCFATE, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER<\/p>\n

The artist has used bark cloth ever since, discovering a variant of lubugo in Indonesia, and he has increased the scale of his work by sewing cloths together. The seams, natural irregularities, and holes in the textile often guide his compositions.<\/p>\n

Armitage typically works on a group of 15 to 20 paintings over a couple of years. For his election-related series, he went to a rally in Kenya and later made studies from his videos of the event. \u201cThe perspective shifted because I was there,\u201d he says. \u201cIn trying to get something of the fervor, I placed the viewer as if they were part of the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

He took a different approach with his migration paintings, which debuted last year at the David Zwirner<\/a> gallery in New York. Armitage based these works on online photographs of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and of people crossing the Sahara desert to escape human slavery. <\/p>\n

\u201cAll the images I used came from sources one could find on their phone,\u201d says Armitage, who translated the harsh footage with chromatic intensity and an almost lyrical magical realism. \u201cThere was an implication for myself, for all of us, that this is something you can\u2019t really turn your back on.\u201d<\/p>\n

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue under the headline \u201cFertile Ground.\u201d\u00a0Subscribe to the magazine.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At once rooted in specific history and sliding into the fantastical, Michael Armitage\u2019s visionary paintings draw on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[12566,228,226,227,92664,229,88,294222,244475,15741,19217],"class_list":["post-674608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-artist","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-bali","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-michael-armitage","tag-pinault-collection","tag-venice","tag-venice-biennale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}