Michael Armitage’s painting asserts itself as a system of perceptual frictions in a liminal state through visual configurations that combine narratives, historical allusions, and present conjunctures. At Palazzo Grassi, The Promise of Change brings together works that cross different spheres, in which the pictorial matter accommodates overlappings between memory, chronicle, and image construction.
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, “Conjestina”, 2017, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; “Curfew, (Likoni March 27 2020)”, 2022, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Ronnie Heyman in honor of Ann Temkin. Acc. no.: 768.2022; “Necklacing”, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Gioconda King, by exchange, 2018 (2018.937). Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio, courtesy Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection
Within the field of global contemporary painting, Armitage’s work is often discussed with regard to its capacity to aggregate different registers of iconography, but above all for the dialectic between figurative recognizability and the conscious instability of reproduction. The artist brings into play the current state of the painting as a variable constituent of representation. Time unfolds disseminated within the ordering language, emerging in discontinuous and layered modes, with metamorphoses that depend on individual works and their intrinsic structure. In Armitage, painting can be observed as a scenario in which the narrative remains inscribed in the weave, assuming heterogeneous and non-univocal architectures.
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, “Strange Fruit”, 2016, Private Collection; “Baikoko at the mouth of the Mwachema River”, 2016, Private Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio, courtesy Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection
The canvases on display unfold this condition through specific contingencies. In Dandora (Xala, Musicians) (2022), a public horizon unfolds around archetypes and movements that refer to an ongoing collective episode. The subjects vibrate in an inconsistent tonal code, emerging and fading like sonic vestiges in the pictorial field. Harmonic and sensory elements interweave in a texture pervaded by multiple cognitive directions, in which gesture and presence seem to distribute themselves across several simultaneous layers of vision. The figures appear and dissolve within fractured fields, as if their emergence were held back by a substrate that exposes them and at the same time withholds them from the theoretical frame. The chromatic impasto transcribes density through pigmentary shifts and interruptions of the mark.
Michael Armitage, “Raft (i)”, 2024, Pinault Collection, oil on Lubugo bark cloth, 220,3 x 170,8 cm, photo Kerry McFate, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
In Raft (i) (2024), a group of figures is placed on an uncertain expanse that evokes hypotheses of displacement and journey. The composition denotes a situation of precarious balance, in which the flow extends beyond the limit of the visible, facilitating the emergence of a completed progression of the gaze. In Don’t Worry There Will Be More (2024), three suspended bodies inscribe a non-linear temporality, indicating a repetitive and dilated diachrony in which the event distributes itself across multiple moments that interpenetrate without a rigid sequence.
Michael Armitage, “Don’t Worry There Will Be More”, 2024, Pinault Collection, oil on Lubugo bark cloth, 170,2 x 221 cm, photo Kerry McFate, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Overall, the solo exhibition highlights a painterly practice in which distinct degrees of experience – retrospective, communal, and bodily – tend to overlap. The reference to Kenya, the artist’s home country, runs through many works as a biographical and geographical frame that combines with current power dynamics and communal tensions. In this perspective, the fact that the support of the paintings is the bark of the Lubugo tree introduces a substantial component that affects the expressive rendering. The surfaces retain traces, stitching, and variations that influence the perception of the paintings and the way in which forms surface in the visual field. This aspect engages with reflections on the survival of morphologies in the history of representation, a theme addressed by Aby Warburg, while the mythical universe traceable to a structure of organization and transformation of eidetic contents can be placed in relation with the analyses of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
(from left to right) Michael Armitage, “Nyayo”, 2017, Private Collection; Strange Fruit, 2016, Private Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio, courtesy Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection
Within the landscape of international painting, Armitage’s corpus situates itself within a broader debate on gestalt transposition and the creation of pictorial syntax, shared by varied procedures including those of Julie Mehretu, Peter Doig, and Kerry James Marshall, within a panorama in which painting continues to redefine its own instruments. The urban, marine, or desert landscape manifests itself in the works as a configuration traversed by oscillation and slippage. In parallel, political and social dimensions appear within the formal enactment of the image.
Michael Armitage, “Dandora (Xala, Musicians)”, 2022, Pinault Collection. Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio, courtesy Palazzo Grassi – Pinault Collection
The title of the exhibition, The Promise of Change, suggests an open premise in which change is located in a process of becoming rather than a defined outcome, leaving room for multiple readings. Taken as a whole, Armitage’s painting can be read as a domain in which the signifier hosts transitory and irregularly sensory levels, keeping alive the relationship between a figuration that always remains on the point of coming apart, or exceeding its own legibility, and its context. Armitage, then, does not describe the instant: he renders it perceptible as a labile substratum of the visus, in which every trace coincides with a duration in the process of being forged, where manner does not stabilize rhythm but exposes it clearly in its active hesitancy.
Info:
Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change
29/03/2026 – 10/01/ 2027
Palazzo Grassi
www.palazzograssi.it
Margherita Artoni is a contemporary art critic and curator working between Italy and the United States. She began collaborating with Flash Art and has written for Segno, Juliet, Artribune, Exibart, Inside Art, ArteIN, part of cult(ure), The Art Fuse, and Whitehot Magazine. She has directed galleries in Turin (NEOCHROME, EDGE ArtSpace) and New York (TEAM Gallery), and curated projects and exhibitions with international artists such as Rashid Johnson, Theaster Gates, Ali Banisadr, Angel Otero, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Laura Owens, and Mika Tajima. She has also curated projects for NADA New York and MIART.
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