‘Michael Armitage: Merging visual traditions’ by Naomi Rea
2026
Michael Armitage, Kerry James Marshall, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Gerhard Richter are among the inaugural Time100 Art list of the Most Influential People in Art. Also included are David Zwirner and gallery architect Annabelle Selldorf.
Kenyan British painter Michael Armitage is a leading figure among young African artists channeling their international success into building local arts infrastructure. In 2020, Armitage founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute to mount exhibitions, preserve archives, and host conversations about East African artists. His own lyrical compositions draw upon and revive the region’s cultural history: he paints on an ancient local material—bark cloth—and has built a distinctive aesthetic language fusing East African and Western European visual traditions. His work often melds real-world events, like an incident of police violence in Kenya during the COVID lockdown or the country’s 2017 elections, with dreamlike landscapes and folk tales in liquid color.
In a testament to the global resonance of his work, his painting The Fourth Estate is included in a group show of contemporary British art at Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina through July 2027. And a major solo presentation of his work, “The Promise of Change,” exhibits dozens of paintings at the Palazzo Grassi, the Venetian museum founded by the French billionaire François Pinault, through January.
Read more at Time.