Michael Armitage's artistry intertwines multiple narratives sourced from historical events, contemporary news media, online rumors, and his personal memories of Kenya, his country of origin.

With a dual base in London and Nairobi, Armitage employs oil paint on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda. This unique material undergoes a beating process over several days, resulting in a natural fabric that, when stretched tightly, reveals occasional perforations and coarse imprints. Armitage deliberately employs Lubugo as a means to both locate and destabilize the subject matter of his paintings.

Through a process of layering paint, scraping, revising, and repainting, Armitage crafts his compositions. Central to his artistic practice lies the visual iconography of East Africa, encompassing urban and rural landscapes, colonial and modern architecture, advertising billboards, lush vegetation, and diverse wildlife. However, beneath this vibrant color palette and dreamlike imagery, lies a subtle exposition of Kenya's at times harsh reality: its political landscape, social inequalities, violence, and extreme wealth disparities. Armitage also reflects on the more absurd elements of everyday life, offering commentary on society and the surrounding natural environment through a lyrical and phantasmagorical lens.

Armitage asserts that painting serves as a means of grappling with and comprehending experiences or events, striving to communicate aspects of these predicaments to others. In his painting "Hornbill" (21st - 24th September 2013) (2014), Armitage portrays one of the terrorists involved in the Westgate Shopping Mall attack, which claimed the lives of 67 individuals, including a group of children filming a cooking show in the mall at the time. By repeatedly incorporating the symbol of the Hornbill bird across a tiled wall in the foreground of the armed figure, Armitage references this loss. In West African mythology, Hornbills are believed to bury their dead in the beak of their bill.

Described by Catherine Lampert, Armitage's approach exhibits a synthesis of various compositional elements. Sometimes shapes flow seamlessly, while other times images are juxtaposed and melded together. Armitage experiments with vivid colors and sinuous lines, eventually achieving a harmonious arrangement of these elements. The inherent instability in his work stems, in part, from the fact that the stories underlying Armitage's paintings have been filtered through inherently unreliable sources. Employing a flattened perspective, Armitage's figurative representations transition fluidly into passages of pure abstraction and back again within a single painting. This fusion of styles creates works that are simultaneously romantic and synchronous, presenting diverse narrative threads only to subsequently unravel them, akin to resonant myths or

Michael Armitage

Kenyan

Main

Artist

Printer

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Vision II