Published to coincide with Michael Armitage’s solo exhibition The Chapel at South London Gallery (December 2017 – February 2018), this catalogue arrays the Kenyan-British artist’s painterly explorations into the ambiguous intersection of religion, folklore and social consensus within Kenyan society. The exhibition brought together seven large-scale paintings in which Armitage blended dream-like figuration with compositional references to masters of Western art history to create works of striking psychological and political intensity. 

Featuring large-scale reproductions of Armitage’s paintings alongside works on paper, this publication offers a generous and multifaceted encounter with the artist’s work. An in-conversation between the artist and Margot Heller, director of South London Gallery and curator of the exhibition, traces the development of his paintings – their making and the layered web of references that animate them. An essay by curator Roger Malbert examines the painterly intelligence and political urgency that characterises the artist’s practice, appraising Armitage’s considered dialogue with art history. Extending this thinking into the social and embodied life of East Africa, writer and scholar Mukami Kuria’s essay moves between the music, publics and contested spaces of the region, drawing out the cultural and political currents that permeate Armitage’s canvases.

Edited by Honey Luard
Texts by Michael Armitage, Margot Heller, Mukami Kuria, Roger Malbert
Designed by Studio Mathias Clottu
Printed by Unicum, Netherlands
300 x 230 mm, softback
100 pages, 55 colour illustrations
ISBN 978-1-910844-27-4
Published by White Cube and South London Gallery, 2017

Margot Heller is Director of the South London Gallery

Mukami Kuria is a Kenyan writer and freelance editor living and studying between Nairobi and Cambridge, UK.

Roger Malbert is a curator and writer and formerly Head of Hayward Touring at the Southbank Centre, London.