Michael Armitage

Colourful exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey of new paintings by Kenyan born artist Michael Armitage.

I’d sum up these pictures as Gaugin meets African textile prints and I did like them! They were figurative works often telling a story with great swirls of pattern around the main subject. They were painted on a quite textured canvas which was pitted and raised in places adding to the impasto of the paint.

I liked one called #mydressmychoice which drew on the classic art historic image of an recumbent female nude but added in a group of men watching her, represented by their feet at the top of the picture and a group of bust babies in the undergrowth at one corner.

These were interesting works and I’d like to see more. It’s nice to find a contemporary painted that wants to tell a story.

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