The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation presents “The Promised Land” , Michael Armitage 's first solo show in Italy (1984). The exhibition includes existing works along with new paintings, produced specifically for the occasion.

Armitage, born in Nairobi, reworks the contradictory dynamics of contemporary Kenya in his pictures. The artist filters through his pictorial language the various spheres that mark the collective and individual life of his country of origin, from local events to small episodes of everyday life, from the declinations of popular culture to the implications of social policies. The myths surrounding African fiction are deconstructed through processes of abstraction that question the unique point of view by bringing out limits and taboos. The personal memory, the direct experience in Kenya join the pressing current events narrated by the media, constituting an imaginary made up of violence and social unease, but also of hope.

Armitage's painting develops through a system of references to the history of art, from rock manifestations, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Titian, Goya, Velazquez and Manet, coming to forge a close relationship with Peter Doig and, above all in the works exhibited in " The Promised Land ”, with Jacob Lawrence and Jack Katarikawe. Starting from Paul Gauguin, the artist appropriates the “exotic” by subverting its Western vision, inviting the viewer attracted by the seductive style of his paintings to problematize the colonial attitude. Looking at the canvas as a possible place of emancipation from the European tradition, the artist paints on the irregular bark fabric of the Lubugo tree, a material belonging to the culture of Uganda once used for funerary shrouds and today sold in tourist markets in the form of souvenirs.

"The Promised Land" brings together a series of works created between 2014 and 2019 in which real and fictitious events related to Kenya are superimposed and layered in surreal atmospheres. The new productions follow the composition of The Fourth Estate (2017), in which opposition political rallies are portrayed before the elections in Kenya in August 2017. Inspired by these great demonstrations, the works reveal the results of strategies in place to the construction of consensus through propaganda installations that result in episodes of collective violence. Previous works recount episodes of East African life, in some cases elevating the subjects to grotesque paradigms of dynamics not metabolized by civil society, as for the intimate homoeroticism of Kampala Suburb (2014) or for the sex tourism scene contained in Mangroves Dip (2015).

Opening: February 21, 7pm