Michael Armitage valuation
Paints East African politics, myth and daily life on Ugandan bark cloth, in a lush, dreamlike style.
Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi in 1984 to an English father and a Kenyan mother and lived there until sixteen, when he went to boarding school in England.
What a work by Michael Armitage is worth
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Bio
Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi in 1984 to an English father and a Kenyan mother and lived there until sixteen, when he went to boarding school in England. He studied at the Slade, graduating in 2007, and at the Royal Academy Schools until 2010. He began as an abstract painter, and since 2014 has painted on lubugo, a bark cloth made by the Baganda of Uganda and traditionally used as a burial shroud, whose seams and holes become part of the surface. His paintings draw on Kenyan politics, news, social media and folklore, and on the history of European painting, in rich, dissolving colour. He showed at the Venice Biennale in 2019, the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a solo show in 2020, and the Royal Academy showed Paradise Edict in 2021. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2022 and designed a new £1 coin for the Royal Mint.
His paintings are few and placed carefully by his gallery, and most are in museums or major collections; those that have reached auction are checked for provenance and exhibition history. Drawings and studies also appear.
Nairobi, the Slade and Paradise Edict
In 2020 he founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, a space for artists and research in Kenya.
His painting Curfew (Likoni March 27, 2020) is in the Museum of Modern Art, and a tapestry adapted from it in 2022 with weavers at West Dean is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
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