Christina Kimeze, Soaring I, 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard. 210 x 165 cm © Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.
Photo: Matthew Hollow
Discover the radiant, textured paintings of Christina Kimeze at the South London Gallery, at her first solo exhibition in the UK.
Kimeze’s work often depicts lone female figures, based on her friends, family, and sometimes herself. The people are immersed in mysterious dreamlike scenes, with plants, arched doorways or spiral staircases. She explores themes of interiority, belonging and ideas of home, taking references from Black, feminist 20th-century writers and her memories of visiting her father’s home country of Uganda.
At the SLG, new paintings originally inspired by the resurgent popularity of roller skating in Black communities in London and beyond explore broader ideas around movement, flight and freedom. These expressive works evoke sensations of the body moving through space, and how those feelings might be conjured in the mind’s eye.
Unusual surface materials are an important part of Kimeze’s practice. Her paintings have a soft, velvet-like texture created using dry chalk, oil pastel and wet paint applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas. In the Fire Station galleries other new paintings and works on paper will be shown alongside a painted folding screen, as well as a newly commissioned tapestry made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.
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The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. Featuring an essay by Eleanor Nairne, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a conversation with the artist and Alayo Akinkugbe, writer, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt.
ABOUT CHRISTINA KIMEZE
Christina Kimeze lives and works in London. Kimeze studied at The Royal Drawing School postgraduate programme 2021-2022 where she was awarded the Sir Denis Mahon award; and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford in Biological Sciences.
Recent exhibitions include: Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists, Freud Museum, London (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room (2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024); Present Tense, Hauser and Wirth, Bruton (2024); Something other than the world might know, White Cube, Paris (2023); Interior, Michael Werner Gallery, London (2023); and The Great Women Artists IV, Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2022).
Lead exhibition donor: The Bukhman Foundation
Catalogue donor: Simon Nixon
Exhibition donors: The Foundation Foundation and Hauser & Wirth
