Exhibition

Michael Armitage: Crucible

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Now Open

May 8—June 27, 2025

Opening Reception

Thursday, May 8, 6–8 PM

Location

New York: 19th Street

533 West 19th Street

New York, New York 10011

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage, which inaugurates the gallery’s new Chelsea building at 533 West 19th Street. This is Armitage’s first solo show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2022 and his first solo presentation in New York since Projects 110: Michael Armitage, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and held at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The exhibition includes new paintings and bronze reliefs by the artist.  In Crucible, Armitage reflects on the theme of migration. Painted on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which the artist has used as a support for more than a decade—these works are marked by a visceral directness that implicates the viewer in the migrant’s journey and the representation of migrants in wider society. The works in the exhibition incorporate elements of real-life imagery to present narratives that are imbued with a profound sense of humanity and pathos.  While some of the paintings evoke vignettes from a migration route that traverses the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe, other works consider aspects of migration in a broader sense.

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Installation view, Michael Armitage: Crucible, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

“Often within Armitage's figuration there are moments of abstraction and narrative layering that complicate an easy categorization of his artistic gestures.... Each time, restlessly, probingly, he reinvents ways to enlist surface ... to tell his stories.”

—Elena Filipovic, director, Kunstmuseum Basel, in “Wounded,” Michael Armitage. You, Who Are Still Alive, 2022

Michael Armitage, 10: Stripped, 2025 (detail)

Michael Armitage, 10: Stripped, 2025 (detail)

 

Michael Armitage, 12: Eli Eli Sabachthani, 2025 (detail)

Michael Armitage, 12: Eli Eli Sabachthani, 2025 (detail)

Michael Armitage, 12: Eli Eli Sabachthani, 2025 (detail)

 

“Neither properly on the ground nor aloft, [his figures] appear suspended in the ‘in-between’, hybrid beings hovering between ‘here’ and ‘there’, this world and that, lived experience and painterly projection. What is at stake, it seems, is the binary, and the unsettlement that destabilizing it can produce.”

—Tamar Garb, art historian, in “Like a Mask Dancing—Michael Armitage and the Promise of Painting,” Michael Armitage: Account of an Illiterate Man, 2021

Installation view, Michael Armitage: Crucible, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

Michael Armitage, Three Fates, 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Three Fates, 2024 (detail)

 
An untitled painting by Michael Armitage, dated 2024.

Michael Armitage, Untitled, 2024 (detail)

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”

—Warsan Shire, Home

Michael Armitage, Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024 (detail)

Installation view, Michael Armitage: Crucible, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

A detail from a painting by Michael Armitage, titled Bound, dated 2025.

Michael Armitage, Bound, 2025 (detail)

A detail from a painting by Michael Armitage, titled Bound, dated 2025.

Michael Armitage, Bound, 2025 (detail)

A detail from a painting by Michael Armitage, titled Bound, dated 2025.

Michael Armitage, Bound, 2025 (detail)

 

Michael Armitage, Untitled, 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Untitled, 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Untitled, 2024 (detail)

 

Installation view, Michael Armitage: Crucible, David Zwirner, New York, 2025

Michael Armitage, Untitled, 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Raft (ii), 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Raft (ii), 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Raft (ii), 2024 (detail)

Michael Armitage, Raft (ii), 2024 (detail)

 

Inquire about works by Michael Armitage