And so it is 3,200.00

2015 - Painting (Painting)

195.5 x 149.5 cm

Michael Armitage

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In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message. The viewer is faced with the familiar image of political power seen in our homes on the television, yet this time located in a whimsical abstract landscape. The speaker appears as a shadow in front of a crowd that is responding to him by holding bubbles containing images of animals and plants. While sensual in its aesthetic, the painting’s political overtones question the structures and centralisation of political power and its constituencies that construct society. The style and composition of the piece refer to Gauguin and Matisse and the idea of a terrestrial paradise sought by the two painters. Yet, the artist interrogates the romantic idea of a preserved Africa and the idea today of a lost paradise. “And so it is” is an enquiry into the complex political and artistic history between the Global North and the Global South.

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Michael Armitage (b. 1984, Nairobi, Kenya) examines different perspectives of reality in his large figurative paintings that reference current affairs, Internet gossip and exchanges and his history and memories of Kenya. Painting with oil on traditional Ugandan canvases, Lubugo, made from trees whose bark is used as blankets, the artist at once dislocated this tradition from its roots and locates his history in the painting itself. In applying the painting in successive layers, Armitage’s figures merge some into others, and disappears others completely—a technique employed to interrogate constructed truths that we are told. The landscape—the urban, rural and colonial—remains a central theme in his work. Using the landscape as a location but also a metaphor, the artist traverses sites of social and political trauma, specifically wealth disparities, violence and the harsh legacy of inequality between men, women, Black and White.

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Colors:

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• political.a.01
• landscape.n.01
• control.n.02
• figural.s.01
• trauma.n.02