Michael Armitage

Biography

In 2011, at a tourist stall in Nairobi, Armitage came across lubugo: fig-tree bark that the Baganda of Uganda strip from the trunk and work until it becomes elastic. Three years later he began painting on it instead of canvas.

He was born in Nairobi in 1984. His father was an Englishman from Yorkshire who worked as an accountant; his mother, a Kenyan of Kikuyu ancestry, sold handmade clothing. He began drawing at six, and a few years later his art teacher encouraged him to keep going. As a teenager he spent a lot of time in the studio of the sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg, the mother of one of his friends. At sixteen he left for boarding school in England. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and graduated in 2007 with a BA. His teachers, he recalled, talked down to him when they spoke about East African art, and it annoyed him. In 2010 he received a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy Schools in London. He began as an abstract painter.

Lubugo, in his words, is a way of grounding his work in East African culture and history. The handmade cloth is fragile and often full of holes, so he has to think in advance about how to place an image, and he thins his paint. Among his early works on lubugo was “Kampala Suburb”, with two men kissing, painted in the style of an Egyptian hieroglyph after a conversation with a friend of his sister about life as a gay man in Kenya, where homosexuality is illegal. He could not show it in Nairobi: the art centre he was working with was uneasy about it.

In 2014 a director of the White Cube gallery in London saw his work in the book “100 Painters of Tomorrow”. From 2015 Armitage has worked with the gallery and taken part in several group exhibitions. In 2016 his first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 2019 his work was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, and a solo show opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In 2020 eight of his paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The same year came his first exhibition in Africa, at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, cut short by the pandemic. At the Haus der Kunst in Munich he showed 27 paintings, along with drawings and lithographs, in the exhibition “Paradise Edict”, and he himself selected 70 works by twentieth-century East African figurative artists for it. A scaled-down version was taken by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2021, and for that exhibition he won a South Bank Sky Arts Award. In 2020 he had also been awarded the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award. In January 2022 he was elected a Royal Academician.

He takes his subjects from East Africa: animals, landscapes, events from his own life and from the news. A series of eight paintings on the 2017 Kenyan elections is based on his observations at rallies before the vote and took two years. The painting “Curfew (Likoni March 27, 2020)”, 2.5 by 3.5 metres and now in MoMA, gives an abstracted version of a real event: in Mombasa, police beat workers who had failed to board ferries before the COVID-19 curfew began. He finished it in 2022. A 2020 work showing four refuse collectors and paramedics moving a patient into an ambulance was commissioned by the Southbank Centre; from it, weavers from West Dean College of Arts and Conservation made a woven wall hanging for the National Portrait Gallery in London.

He says he lives with an idea for a year or more before he starts to paint it. He also treats European painting as material for parody: the way Gauguin and Watteau saw the tropics. Among those who influenced him he names Goya, Gauguin, Peter Doig, the Ugandan Jak Katarikawe, and the Kenyans Meek Gichugu and Chelenge Van Rampelberg. Critics have compared his colour to Fauvism.

In 2020 Armitage founded the non-profit Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Nairobi. In May 2022 the Royal Mint announced that he would design a new £1 coin, to be issued in 2023. The same year he had an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel. He lives and works in London and Nairobi and spends several months a year in Kenya.