Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict

Edited by Anna Schneider, with contributions by Elsbeth Court, Imraan Coovadia, Anna Schneider and Dimona Stöckle; and a conversation between Michael Armitage and Don Handa

Paradise Edict highlights pivotal series by the painter Michael Armitage and positions his body of work within East African painting and sculpture of the 20th century. His wide array of subject matter ranges from the relationship between humans and animals, and political events in his native Kenya, to European landscape traditions in opposition to an East African understanding of nature. With large-format oil paintings on lubugo bark cloth, the British-Kenyan painter joins motifs and artistic traditions from Europe and East Africa in a variety of ways, upsetting visual stereotypes and an excepted balance of power in the process.