Michael Armitage with Seyni Awa Camara: Amongst the Living

For his exhibition “Amongst the Living,” Michael Armitage is presenting recent paintings and works on paper in an installation that features a group of terra cotta sculptures by the Senegalese artist Seyni Awa Camara, whose work Armitage greatly admires. On view at White Cube’s Bermondsey gallery through October 30, the works featured were made in the last three years, inspired by his time in Nairobi. Here, the artist offers up a cultural narrative where the Kenyan landscape is the connective thread between the stories of its people, encompassing a dynamic suite of works (some of which have been painted onto Lubugo cloth, made from Ugandan fig bark) like the 2020 Illiterate Man, a discourse on recent political turmoil titled Curfew (Liken, March 27, 2020), and paintings based on the novel The Perfect Nine by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, which counts the tale of a family with ten daughters, one of whom is severely disabled and becomes the story’s heroine. It is within this narrative that Camara’s figures exist, their hand-modeled forms ranging from 20 inches to nearly 8 feet tall.