A representation of the plurality of human experiences

‘Another’s Tongue’ brings together works on paper that the Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage draws from life, his memory and other sources, including his video notes which form the epilogue of the exhibition. In fluid ink studies, Armitage paints the expanse of the Kenyan landscape and its wildlife, as well as life on the streets in urban East Africa. His vivid character sketches capture the energy of performers, prophets, musicians, the costumed crowds at Kenyan election rallies, and the illegal brewers in Nairobi’s slums.

The painter Walter Sickert said, ” I would like all of the works to be different, but also unified. Different in the sense that every day is different, different in that experiences are always different, I’d like the work to reflect that sort of change and the way a mind changes, the way an attitude shifts “. This is also exactly how Armitage would like its work to be perceived.

A political dimension

During the visit of Michael Armitage’s exhibition “the Accomplice” at the Norval Foundation the writer Imraan coovadia said ” Armitage is clearly more interested in the poetic or philosophical significance of his visual material than in its purely documentary value. And so he is typically drawn to what takes place away from the political stage: the moving human dramas or “sub- plots” that distract from and question the dominant political narrative, telling different, often competing, stories“.

Armitage has for example, during the 2017 Kenyan elections joined a local TV crew at an opposition rally in Uhuru Park in the centre of Nairobi. Caught up in the large crowds, Armitage recalled a tree full of perching observers, and carnivalesque revellers dressed up in wigs, masks and carrying slings. These characters were later caught on camera running from teargas and hurling stones at the police, who retaliated with gunfire. Many of the works on paper derive from film footage of these scenes, and later informed a series of paintings.

Michael Armitage

Michael Armitage was born in 1984 in Nairobi, Kenya. He works between Nairobi and London where, from 2007 until 2010, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools. Within the last year, Armitage has participated in the 58th Venice Biennale and had solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Museum of Modern Art, New York in collaboration with the Studio Museum Harlem, and the Norval Foundation, Cape Town. 

Concerning the methods used, Armitage unifies his diverse subject matter by the use of the medium Prout’s brown ink. Traditionally used for architectural renderings, the burnt umber ink allows Armitage to layer and dilute his marks in a way analogous to the building-up and rubbing-down of his painting practice. Tonal brushwork with strong chiaroscuro brings to life expressive facial and physical features, capturing a fleeting expression or glimpsed moment with economy and sensitivity.

White’s cube Gallery

Contemporary Art Exhibition

From July 6 to August 16 of 2020

144-152, Bermondsey St, Bermondsey, London SE1 3TQ

United Kingdom

The post Another’s Tongue : a major online solo exhibition appeared first on Artskop.

Armitage, who is based between Nairobi, Kenya, where he grew up, and London, UK, where he studied, has recently gained international critical acclaim by major museums, curators, collectors and galleries. Testament to this is an upcoming solo exhibition at Haus de Kunst (Munich, Germany) next year and previous solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney, Australia), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, Italy), South London Gallery (London, UK), Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK) and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco, USA). He has been included in group exhibitions internationally, including The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series at The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), 2019 Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Prospect.4 (New Orleans, USA) and the 2015 Lyon Biennale (Lyon, France). Additionally, Armitage has had numerous commercial exhibitions.

Instead of canvas or linen, the paintings included in the exhibition at Norval Foundation are completed on Lubugo cloth, which is crafted from the bark of the mutuba tree in southern Uganda. A textile developed by the Baganda people, and designated a piece of oral and intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, Lubugo is created by removing a thin layer of bark from the mutuba tree, which is then beaten with a series of mallets to form a thin, flexible material. Traditionally used as a burial shroud and for ceremonial clothing, and therefore invested with complex cultural meanings, it was adopted by Armitage after he discovered it in a tourist store in Nairobi in 2010.

The fissures and irregularities of the stretched lubugo are incorporated into the composition of his paintings, creating a dialogue between the artist’s practice and the conceptual and historical meanings of the cloth, as well as its particular material qualities.

The works included in Accomplice, grounded in the artist’s observations of political rallies in Nairobi prior to the 2017 Kenyan general elections, also demonstrate Armitage’s extensive art historical knowledge. The compositional structures and thematic concerns of the paintings echo key artworks from both Western and African art histories. This is evident in The Fourth Estate (2017), a centrepiece of the exhibition, in which crowds of political supporters of Kenya’s opposition party congregate on and around a large tree in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park. The scene clearly locates the work within an East African context, yet parallels exist between Armitage’s work and Francisco Goya’s Ridiculous Folly (Disparate ridiculo) (circa 1819-1824; published 1864). Similarly, The promise of change (2018), in which political leaders are transformed into mannequins, recalls the disfigured bodies in Goya’s print series, The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) (1810-1820; published 1863).

Other works included in the exhibition are Mkokoteni (2019), Pathos and the twilight of the idle (2019), The Accomplice (2019), The Chicken Thief (2019), The Dumb Oracle (2019), The promise of change (2018) and The promised land (2019).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication, edited by Sandra Dodson and Owen Martin with graphic design by Daniel Rautenbach. The publication will feature two essays.

Accomplice: Michael Armitage

Norval Foundation

Gallery 1

Opening February 8th 2020

February 8th – June 15th 2020

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