Michael Armitage

Michael Armitage is a Kenyan-born British painter whose richly coloured compositions explore history, politics, memory and mythology. Drawing on East African life and culture, as well as Western art history, he creates enigmatic scenes in which personal recollections and contemporary events merge with imagined narratives.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1984, He graduated at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2007 and pursued a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy Schools, graduating in 2010. A defining feature of Armitage’s practice is his use of lubugo — a traditional Ugandan bark cloth made by beating the inner bark of a fig tree — for his oil paintings. Its irregular surface, punctured with holes and marked by ridges and seams, lends his paintings a distinctive physical quality. Working in translucent layers of oil paint, he builds intricate compositions in which vivid colour and fluid brushwork contrast with unsettling subject matter. His imagery draws on newspaper reports, photographs, personal memories and political events, addressing themes of power, displacement, social unrest and the legacies of colonialism.

Armitage gained wider recognition through exhibitions including the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and Projects 110: Michael Armitage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2020. His major exhibition Paradise Edict opened at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2020 before travelling to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2021. In the same year, he was elected a Royal Academician. His subsequent exhibitions include Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2023 and The Promise of Change at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2026.

His work is held in major international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London and the Art Institute of Chicago. Armitage has also achieved significant recognition at auction. With a studio based in London, the artist splits his time and working practice between Nairobi and Indonesia.