Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change

Forthcoming July 2026

Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Texts by Manthia Diawara, Jean-Marie Gallais, Salman Rushdie, and Ocean Vuong. Conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Michael Armitage.

"Michael Armitage responds to his time, to our time, using all the vocabulary, all the arsenal of art. He paints on lubugo canvas, made from tree bark, and makes his fragility an asset, suggesting that his human subjects can also transform their own into strength, and that what can work this magic is beauty." — Salman Rushdie

The Promise of Change is the publication that accompanies the major exhibition of the same name that Pinault Collection dedicates to the British painter Michael Armitage in the exhibition spaces of Palazzo Grassi in Venice (from March 29, 2026 to January 10, 2027).

Armitage, born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1984, is a leading figure in the new international figurative painting. His research combines references to the European pictorial tradition with elements of East African visual culture, creating images of great narrative force and remarkable visual impact thanks to an extraordinary and highly personal use of color.

The volume offers an in-depth overview of his production, which now covers more than a decade, presenting, through a wide selection of reproductions of the works on display, scenes suspended between reality and imagination that address themes such as cultural identity and collective memory, politics and social transformations, myths, traditions, and popular narratives.

Critical texts and testimonies by Manthia Diawara, Jean-Marie Gallais, Salman Rushdie and Ocean Vuong join a long and recent interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with the artist and take shape with the extraordinary graphic and cartotechnical project of Irma Boom Office.