Michael Armitage

Michael Armitage’s paintings brim with vibrant fragments. Resembling allover paintings reinvigorated by a return to the figure, their power derives from unexpected resolution. This exhibition of the last six years of his work, with its curatorial groupings of animal, landscape, and figure-focused paintings, shares Armitage’s equalizing impulse; his motifs are less compelling when considered individually than when seen simultaneously, as conversant elements in of his painterly language.

A considered layering is essential to Armitage’s project, as his material process offers a postcolonial intervention into the history of painting. Stitching together pieces of Lubugo, an East African bark cloth, Armitage then applies a thin glaze to accentuate the shroud’s irregular texture before rendering images in oils. In compositions and colors borrowed from European Old Masters and informed by contemporary East African figuration, Armitage paints scenes of his native Kenya infused by mythical tales from both continents. In The Promise of Change, 2018, Armitage imagines Kenya’s contentious 2017 election through the sort of toadish transmogrification found in fables, as a trio huddles in contorted postures on a stage beside a pucker-lipped frog. Like a grotesque apparition, another amphibian hovers above an amorphous crowd, its greenish skin gaping with holes torn in the cloth. Like Goya’s satirical “Los caprichos” (The Whims), 1797–99, these figures are at once archetypal and stirringly individual. Armitage is, above all, a painter of people, and the depth of the human visage—the furrow in a brow, the quiver in a lip—is the lynchpin of his kaleidoscopic compositions.