Michael Armitage

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Michael Armitage (b. 1984) is a Kenyan-British artist renowned for his distinct, meditative paintings which bring together the artist’s indelible connection to his heritage and the contemporaneous affairs of his home country with an erudite and highly informed approach to the development of his compositions. Educated at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy in London, Armitage draws on his dual heritage to address complex political, social, and cultural themes, often using allegory and surreal imagery. His paintings, which often exist in a liminal space between representationalism and abstraction, are rich in symbolism and narrative depth, creating a dialogue between personal experience and collective memory.

The present lot, one of two early works by the artist featured in the Modern and Contemporary African art auction, demonstrate the first iterations of Armitage’s now sprawling practice. At first sparce and abstract, the works reveal the process of the artist’s deeply cerebral practice, in which line, colour, texture and form deliberate to achieve compositional balance. Herein we find the seeds of the artist’s conceptual provocations, particularly with his use of textiles as canvas, a gesture which no doubt references the material traditions which have seen East Africans patronise multi-coloured exported cloth from global production lines since the 15^th century. We thus observe in this work the earliest instances of the artistic gestures which see Armitage explore themes like colonialism, social justice, and African identity, and which have earned him international acclaim.

Armitage’s works are held by preeminent institutions globally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Musset, Oslo; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin Italy; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Norval Foundation, Cape Town; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Tate, United Kingdom.