“It’s a bit like being weighed and measured when you have an exhibition of this scale,” the artist Michael Armitage tells The Art Newspaper, the day before a monographic show of his works opens at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. With 46 large paintings and a room packed with nearly 100 sketches, it surveys the past ten years of his work. “It’s been amazing to take on a space like this, but unnerving—interesting to reflect and jarring to see all the work together.”
Indeed, the Palazzo Grassi is a very grand space, the last gasp of the Venetian Republic, rebuilt in the mid-1700s with soaring staircases, frescoed walls and highly decorated ceilings. Since 2005 it has been in the ownership of François Pinault; previous painters to be shown here (all significantly represented in Pinault’s collection) include Albert Oehlen, Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas—respectively 64, 60 and 70 when invited to the palace. At 42 years old, Armitage is young for such a show.
But his work more than meets the challenge. As this exhibition, called The Promise of Change, demonstrates, Armitage is a supremely talented painter and thinker, who mines the history of art, the timelessness of mythology and his own background to create work of beauty, depth, technical acuity and social resonance that ranges from crisply figurative to wholly hallucinatory. As Salman Rushdie writes in the accompanying catalogue (designed by Irma Boom), “Armitage responds to his time, our time, by using the full vocabulary, the full arsenal of art.”
East African exposure
The artist’s star has risen fast since he was propelled forwards by an exhibition at the White Cube in London in 2016. “I’d been out of education for five years, no one was looking at my work, and I’d just applied for a teacher training course,” Armitage says of a sliding-doors moment when the gallery’s Irene Bradbury knocked on his studio door in 2015. “I didn’t even know she was from a gallery when she made the appointment. Then I was offered an exhibition and given six months to do something that I normally would have spent two or five years on. That pace didn’t really stop until three years ago. I had children. It changed things.”
Michael Armitage’s artistic education began in Kenya, where he was influenced by East African artists; his first show was at London’s White Cube in 2016
Photo by Tom Jamieson, © Michael Armitage, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Armitage, born in 1984, grew up in Kenya, the child of a man from Huddersfield in England and a woman from Nairobi. There, he was exposed to East African art, particularly through the Kenyan sculptor Chelenge Van Rampelberg, who happened to be the mother of his best friend. “She had paintings by Meek Gichugu in her home. And she is also one of Kenya’s best contemporary artists,” Armitage says. His first exposure to Western art only happened during his foundation year at the Byam Shaw School of Art. “We went to the National Gallery and the tutor took us to the Titian painting of Diana, and I thought, it’s muddy, it’s brown, the femurs are so long, the brush work is so loose,” he says.
Much has changed. Over time at the Slade and the Royal Academy’s post-graduate school, Armitage intertwined his appreciation of East African art with that of Western Europe, and the influences of both abound. In the exhibition, for example, a 2018 painting of Antigone is partly inspired by a work by pre-eminent Ugandan artist Jak Katarikawe; she is dreaming of a wedding. Another, Mydas (2019), was created by Armitage after he had seen Titian’s late-career Pietà in the Accademia in Venice. “It was the first time I was in Venice, in 2019,” he recalls. “I saw so many different types of language in that painting. I learnt something. I was intrigued by the white paint on Jesus’s body, the way he’d painted the lion’s face.” Armitage’s painting shows a man in a desert setting and becomes a deliberation on the land disputes engendered by drought.
The subjects of Armitage’s work are primarily those that are a part of daily life in Kenya: political instability, violence, loss and migration (a large and agonising series of the last occupies the first-floor rooms that look onto the Grand Canal). If that sounds wearying, it is far from it. Armitage commits to these issues with an energy that allows the viewer to become part of the process, slaloming between documentary and dreamlike scenarios. The influence of cinema—particularly that of the Senegalese film director Ousmane Sembène—is all over the show, in cinemascopic canvases that are immersive in scale and subject. But, equally, Goya is never far away, in the fast mark-making that Armitage employs in his painting and in the lack of side-taking. As in Goya’s Disasters of War, atrocity affects all the participants in Armitage’s world; there are no heroes or villains.
Cave (2021) is painted on Ugandan lubugo bark canvas, which Armitage started using in 2012
Photo by Theo Christelis, © White Cube; artwork © Michael Armitage
Sense of place
Paul Gauguin, Maria Lassnig, Willem de Kooning—Armitage assimilates these artists into a language that becomes very much his own, with paint applied and reapplied, rubbed away, washed by water. “It all sounds complicated, but I feel I’m hideously logical,” says Armitage.
His individuality is further reinforced by his use of lubugo, a canvas created from tree bark, which he came across in 2012 in Uganda. “If I worked on normal canvas, it would put me in the world of German Expressionism, Fauvism,” Armitage says. Lubugo provides a sense of place and identity, each piece’s uneven surface scattered with mends and holes. He has since discovered a similar canvas in Indonesia, where he moved with his wife four years ago.
“The most recent paintings are of Indonesian landscapes,” he says, pointing to one called God Move and another, 52,000 Years, both made in 2025 in his Balinese studio. They are effusive jungle landscapes that suggest the possibility of trouble in paradise. “There are things that are similar to life in Kenya,” says Armitage of his new location. “I’ve been viewed as a foreigner in the places that I grew up and lived. But now I really am.”
• Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change, Palazzo Grassi, until 10 January 2027
