Artists

Born in Nairobi, Michael Armitage lives and works in London and Kenya. He graduated in Fine Art from Slade School of Art in London in 2007 and completed a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy Schools in 2010. Armitage is known for his richly coloured, dream-like, and sometimes abstract oil paintings on Lubugo bark cloth from Uganda. Armitage comments on the often harsh reality of Kenyan life including the politics, violence, and social and economic inequalities, by portraying everyday life and society through imagery that includes the rural and urban landscape, vegetation and animals, and the human figure.

Armitage has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award in 2020. He was awarded the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Visual Art for his exhibition Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict at The Royal Academy of Arts in 2021 and was elected a Royal Academician of Painting later that year. Armitage has recently entered into a collaboration with the Royal Mint, United Kingdom to design a new £1 coin to celebrate the coin’s 40^th anniversary in 2023.

Armitage has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions at numerous prominent international venues including Tate Britain and The Royal Academy in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, amongst others. His work is represented in renowned museum collections worldwide, including Tate Modern in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.