Shabu Mwangi
Road to Mpeketoni
About the SessionNAIROBI – Following their successful collaboration in 2025, Strauss & Co, Africa’s leading auction house, and Danda Jaroljmek, Director of Art Auction East Africa, will present Art Auction East Africa | Strauss & Co, a 67-lot sale bringing together modern and contemporary art from East Africa and the wider continent. The live-virtual sale will be held at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi on Wednesday, 28 October, 2026, 7pm EAT. The catalogue spans a diversity of East African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, alongside works by artists from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Nigeria. Works on paper, photography and sculpture complements the strong painting consignment. “The selection invites collectors to discover East Africa’s diverse modernist histories, particularly those beyond the Anglophone world,” says Susie Goodman. “In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in East African modernists, with artists associated with the Khartoum School shown in museums and fairs globally. Our work as an auction house rooted in Africa is ensuring this rediscovery is not temporary. We are delighted to partner with Danda Jaroljmek in cultivating a sustainable secondary market for East African modernists active during the era of decolonisation and independence.” A preview exhibition will be held at Circle Art Gallery, Victoria Square, Riara Road, Nairobi, during the two weeks preceding the auction on Wednesday, 28 October 2026.
LOT 6
Shabu Mwangi
Road to Mpeketoni
About this Item
signed and dated 20/07/2015
Provenance
The Artist's Collection.
Notes
Shabu Mwangi has been a practicing artist since 2003. His practice focuses on the effects of structural and historical violence, and different forms of marginalization on the individual and collective psyche. His paintings are considerations of societal and cultural fissures. His most recent work traces an ongoing personal journey of striving to understand the balance between the two things that drive us, love and pain, and how we react in different ways depending on which of the two is dominant. Mwangi’s work has previously dealt with questions of collective suffering, and the effects that inequality, marginalization, and other forms of structural violence have on communities. In this new body of work, he has turned his gaze inwards, focusing on an examination of the self. He asks himself questions about how he sees the people around him and his interactions with them.
Mwangi has participated in workshops and residency programs both locally and internationally. His work has most recently featured in Systems of Emptiness, a prelude to Documenta15, a group show with Wajukuu and The Sources of Our Seas, a solo show at Circle Art Gallery in 2021; East African Encounters, a Circle Art Gallery group exhibition at Cromwell Place in London in 2021, and Self-Addressed, an exhibition of self-portraiture by artists from Africa and its diaspora curated by Kehinde Wiley for Deitch Projects LA. Other shows include The Man with Two Shadows (2020), an online exhibition with Circle Art Gallery; Yawning for Power (2019), a solo exhibition with Tilleard Projects; The Stateless, a solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery (2018); Freedom, Flight, Refuge, Circle Art Gallery (2017); Art Transposition Nairobi-Kampala-Hamburg, LKB Gallery, Hamburg; Pop-Up Africa, GAFRA, London (2017); and Out of the Slum (2012), Essen, Germany. He has also participated in residencies in Kenya, Germany, and Italy. In 2022, Mwangi and fellow members of the Wajukuu Art Project participated in documenta fifteen in Kassel, where they went on to win the Arnold Bode prize. Mwangi participated in the 13a Biennial do Mercosul in Brazil in 2022.
The artist currently lives in Nairobi.
Biography courtesy of Circle Art Gallery.
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