A talk with Michael Armitage - In The Studio (2017)
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- Опубліковано 12 чер 2017
- Hear Michael Armitage talk about his ideas, his process, and the Lubugo barkcloth he paints on.
Michael Armitage's paintings weave multiple narratives that are drawn from historical and current news media, internet gossip, and his own ongoing recollections of Kenya, his country of birth.
Living and working between London and Nairobi, Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth from Uganda, which is beaten over a period of days creating a natural material which when stretched taut has occasional holes and coarse indents. As noted by the artist, the use of Lubugo is at once an attempt to locate and destabilise the subject of his paintings.
Applying the paint in layers, Armitage scrapes, revises and repaints his compositions. The visual iconography of East Africa lies at the heart of his practice: its urban and rural landscape, colonial and modern vernacular architecture, advertising hoardings, lush vegetation and varied animal life. Undermining this rich colour palette and dream-like imagery, however, is a quiet exposition of Kenya’s sometimes harsh reality: its politics, social inequalities, violence and extreme disparities in wealth. In turn, Armitage reflects on the more absurd aspects of the every day, commenting on both society and the surrounding natural environment - evoked with a lyrical and phantasmagorical vision.
Armitage claims that ‘Painting is a way of thinking through something, trying to understand an experience or an event a little better and trying to communicate something of the problem to others’. In the painting 'Hornbill' (21st - 24th September 2013) (2014), Armitage depicts one of the four terrorists who carried out the Westgate Shopping Mall attack, in which 67 people were killed including a group of children who were filming a cookery programme in the mall at the time. Armitage makes reference to this loss, by implanting the symbol of the Hornbill bird repeatedly across a tiled wall to the foreground of this armed figure; as according to West African myth Hornbills bury their dead in the beak of their bill.
In the painting Necklacing (2016), a naked man with a tyre around his neck is framed by two sutures or lines in the Lubugo surface, that run vertically either side of his body. A penetrating, haunting image, the idea for the painting surfaced from an event the artist witnessed as a child, in which a naked man with a tyre around his neck was being chased through the streets of Nairobi by a large mob. Necklacing is the name given to this type of unlawful mob justice enacted by gangs across Africa.
Inspired by the 2017 Kenyan General Elections, Armitage centred a series of eight paintings and ink drawings around his own experience at an opposition rally situated in Uhuru Park with a local press team. Amongst the crowds, the artist bears witness to politics at play as he recalls a number of carnivalesque revellers dressed up in outfits with wigs, masks and slings at the ready to rouse further attention. Those same characters were reported in the news running through teargas throwing stones at the police force that replied with live rounds, as further political rallies turned to protest and eventual violence.
As Catherine Lampert describes: ‘His approach is synthetic but various in terms of composition; sometimes shapes flow, occasionally images are cut and pasted, he experiments with florid colour and sinuous line, and eventually the elements click into place….This instability exists in part because the stories that inform Armitage’s paintings have been filtered by inherently unreliable voices.’ Using a flattened perspective Armitage’s figuration evolves into passages of pure abstraction, and then back again seamlessly within one painting creating works that are both romantic and synchronous, offering up various narrative threads, only to then unravel them like a resonant myth or legend.
Michael Armitage was born in 1984 in Nairobi, Kenya and lives and works between London and Nairobi. He received his BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2007) and has a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2010). Solo exhibitions include: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020), The Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2020), Projects 110, Studio Museum in collaboration and at MoMA, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2019), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo , Turin (2019) South London Gallery (2017); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2017); White Cube, Hong Kong (2017); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco (2016); White Cube, London (2015); and Royal Academy Schools Studios, London (2010).
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Where have I been? Why am I just now discovering this creative spirit? His art amazes me.
Glad I came across this. He is truly a brilliant artist!
Beautiful..enjoyed this..thank you..🎇🎇💝💝
Such a beautiful video, story and art. Thank you
Love his vision and how he interprets his idea into the process. Bravo Michael! 👍🏻👏🏻
Wonderful!
very well explained wonderful work too.
Love it,it must be an amazing material to work on .
Cool artist I like his work and I particularly like the fact that he likes the word particular a lot
That’s really , really cool.
Winks
Lisa
Love the last bit about how tree bark cloth used for the painter's canvases is produced. The tradition of an age-old culture in production of this natural cloth speaks of humanity intrinsically embedded into and respectfully with the environment when one sees the care and attention to see the tree is nurtured to survive after being 'skinned alive'. It seemed to be an East African family task where young hands and old lent a hand with the making of the cloth. I hope a fair price is paid for the intensive work needed in Michael Armitage's canvases :-)
This is really awesome. Personally, I'm intrigued by the subject matter more. However, I've seen some paintings done on leso/khanga canvas at an exhibition in Nairobi. It makes a huge difference on the impact of the painting.
The narrative of Eastern Africa & Lubugo bark - incredible!
This was really interesting,I saw these paintings at Turner contemporary and I enjoyed them although sometimes the subject matter was difficult.
Peter Doig , Gaugin , Blue Pink Picasso....clearly
STUDIO IN KENYAAA!!!!!!! GOALSSSS
Santi Martos wassup santi
Me gusta!
Loved to find this. Very interesting and very beautifull paintings - and a very amazing process both the production of the bark cloth and the way of finding images from different sources -
Thank you so much for this video ! Theses paintings are beautiful. I'm really curious to see one in real life to see how is the texture of theses cloth. I think the artist do beautiful drawings too.
Looks a lot like late Munch paintings
Doing paintings on the cloth with which they bury their dead, is a bit ominous though.
Really enjoyed learning about the process of making the bark cloth.
Watching that studio assistant smash the canvas with a stapler was awful 😂
Dogs and trees bark....
Get a table with wheels mate
Not feeling it
Don’t fill in .
Boring posh boy has found his gimmick - the bark - as Chris Ofili has his dung. So the paintings are a bang up to date mix of Peter Doig and Chris Ofili - engineered to suit the slavering, myopic curators.
Very thoughtful artist. However, I have seen a show of his a few years ago and I was a bit disapointed, had too much of a Peter Doig vibe to me. Wish him the best nevertheless.
Dude, I got bored listening to you.
What a waste of good Belgium Lenin
What a waste of good canvas