Michael Armitage Opens the Door to His Studio in Nairobi Ahead of His Major Installation in Venice

At once rooted in specific history and sliding into the fantastical, Michael Armitage’s visionary paintings draw on the history, politics, mythology, and terrain of his native East Africa and Bali, where the Kenyan British artist has been based since 2022. He has long had an interest in “the landscape as a character,” he says, “as a container of culture, belief, generations, the expressions of a people.”

The mountainous scene in 52,000 Years, a work Armitage completed last year, reflects the kind of tropical, verdant view he wakes up to in Bali. Only in this rendering, stylized wild pigs and antelope skitter across the canvas, hunted by little humanlike figures with ghostly halos—a reference to ancient cave paintings recently discovered on the nearby Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Rising up in the foreground is a kaleidoscopic formation of human heads suspended in some kind of liminal otherworldly state.

“The painting is about this relation to time,” says Jean-Marie Gallais, curator at the Pinault Collection, which has staged Armitage’s largest survey to date, “The Promise of Change,” at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice through January 2027. “What interests Michael is that the first known human figurative painting in the world is located in the Sulawesi cave.”

The exhibition, coinciding in part with the Venice Biennale, includes 45 paintings and some 120 studies and works on paper made since 2014. Organized thematically, the show moves through different series, from paintings referencing contemporary affairs such as Kenya’s 2017 elections and the migration and refugee crisis to works based on mythological figures such as Antigone and Warigia to recent landscapes.

“Bali is a visually overwhelming place to step into as a foreigner but also remarkably welcoming and open,” says Armitage, who moved from England with his Indonesian wife to raise their daughter, now three. After finishing his art studies at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London, he kept a studio in the city for more than a decade, splitting his time between there and Nairobi, Kenya, where he was born and raised.

From a young age, Armitage wanted only to draw and paint, and he studied with an art teacher on weekends. As a preadolescent, he was introduced to the Kenyan art scene by his best friend’s mother, sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg, who gave him a model for being an artist as a way of life.

Armitage still maintains a studio in Nairobi, where he founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute to promote the art of East Africa in 2020. One recent exhibition grouped works that address the human condition by him and Van Rampelberg with drawings by the late Austrian artist Maria Lassnig, an important influence on Armitage. Years of art school in London provided him with an immersion in Western art history, from how Paul Cézanne laid down color to conceptual approaches. “I always go back to Goya,” he says.

It was during a postgrad period of profound questioning about what and how to make art that Armitage began searching for a way “from the beginning of the paintings to ground them in East Africa in this kind of sociopolitical and cultural space.” A turning point came when, visiting a tourist market in Kenya, he discovered a piece of reddish-brown lubugo bark cloth, a traditional Ugandan textile used to wrap the dead for funeral rituals.

“The surface was quite rough and not what I was used to painting on,” says Armitage, who began to experiment with stretching and priming this “supercharged material” like canvas and thinning down his paint so he could work more fluidly on the surface. “It really opened a door for me.”

The artist has used bark cloth ever since, discovering a variant of lubugo in Indonesia, and he has increased the scale of his work by sewing cloths together. The seams, natural irregularities, and holes in the textile often guide his compositions.

Armitage typically works on a group of 15 to 20 paintings over a couple of years. For his election-related series, he went to a rally in Kenya and later made studies from his videos of the event. “The perspective shifted because I was there,” he says. “In trying to get something of the fervor, I placed the viewer as if they were part of the scene.”

He took a different approach with his migration paintings, which debuted last year at the David Zwirner gallery in New York. Armitage based these works on online photographs of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and of people crossing the Sahara desert to escape human slavery.

“All the images I used came from sources one could find on their phone,” says Armitage, who translated the harsh footage with chromatic intensity and an almost lyrical magical realism. “There was an implication for myself, for all of us, that this is something you can’t really turn your back on.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Summer Issue under the headline “Fertile Ground.” Subscribe to the magazine.