Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change

Pinault Collection presents a major exhibition dedicated to Michael Armitage, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais. Bringing together forty-five paintings, including new works, and more than one hundred studies, the exhibition offers an extensive view of Armitage’s pictorial language and its engagement with social, political and psychological realities.

Working between narratives drawn from lived experience and more dreamlike visions, Armitage addresses sociopolitical tension, violence, ideology, migration, memory and identity. Based between Kenya and Indonesia, he draws on a wide range of sources, including historical and contemporary news, political demonstrations, literature, cinema, local rituals, architecture, flora and fauna, and global art history. East Africa, and Kenya in particular, remain central to his work, which moves between precise historical reference and more ambiguous, open-ended scenes.

Across the exhibition, figures, landscapes and narratives overlap, combining real and fictional spaces and multiple points of view. Armitage’s paintings are marked by a dense, layered approach and a vivid chromatic intensity that remains in tension with the harshness of many of his subjects. His use of bark cloth sourced from Uganda and Indonesia, rather than canvas, is integral to the work, with its irregularities directly shaping the composition. The exhibition also includes a room devoted to drawing, foregrounding the role of preparatory studies, detail and composition within his practice. It is accompanied by a catalogue published in collaboration with Marsilio Arte (Venice), featuring texts by Manthia Diawara, Jean-Marie Gallais, Salman Rushdie and Ocean Vuong, as well as an interview between Michael Armitage and Hans Ulrich Obrist.