Born in 1984 in Nairobi, Kenya, Michael Armitage is a painter who captures the past and⛄ the present, the real and the imagined, reimagining those vignettes with a distinctly alluring sensibility. He received his 💜BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art, London, and a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London.

Living and working between London, Nairobi, and Indonesia, Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a traditional Ugandan cloth made from bark that is repeatedly struck in the production process, resulting in a fabric with punctures and dents. Repeatedly scraping and layering pigment, the artist takes inspiration from art historical motifs, his memories of Kenya, current events and its surrounding sociopolitical discourse, weaving those narratives together with an iconic lush palette and visual iconography. In the artist’s own words, his practice is an act of bearing witness to the every day: “Painting is a way of thinking through something, trying to understand an experience or event a little better and try♈ing to communicate something of the problem to others.”

Armitage’s rich palette of color and dreamy narratives have attracted the attention of distinguished institutional collections across the globe. The artist was elected a Royal Academician of Painting by the Royal Academy of Art, London in 2021 and was awarded the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award in 2020. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions such as Pathos and the Twilight of Idle at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Paradise Edict at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, or Projects 110 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His works are collected by countless prestigious museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Basel; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum 💜of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Astrup Fearnley Museu𝓰m of Modern Art, Oslo, among others.