MICHAEL ARMITAGE | EARLY PORTRAIT (FRIEND FROM BRYANSTON)

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Pre-dating Armitage’s first encounter with Ugandan lubogo cloth, now the artist’s material of choice for the base of his dreamlike narrative scenes, Early Portrait (Friend from Bryanston) is thickly painted on canvas with the same florid brushwork as his later works. Describing the influences on his practice, Armitage sites the “abstract beauty of the melody” of Congolese soukous music (Michael Armitage in conversation with Ben Luke, ‘A Brush with…Michael Armitage’, The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2020, online). Likewise, the lattice of vibrant hues of which the present work is composed possesses a certain musicality, delicately weaving together line and colour all the while undulating between abstraction and figuration.

Armitage’s impasto brushwork, expertly handled with expressionist flare, reads as a study in lines – an element at the core of Armitage’s practice to this day. Rather than the curved, sensuous outlines of recent years, this work employs a more rigid and geometric use of mark-making. Armitage states that “The space that is quite abstract, at times geometric…is very much derived from an urban environment where flat planes and rectangular forms dominate,” reflecting the urban metropolis of the Nairobi of Armitage’s youth (Michael Armitage in conversation with Ben Luke, ‘A Brush with…Michael Armitage’, The Art Newspaper, 5 August 2020, online).

Painted when the artist was a student at Bryanston Boarding School after moving to England, Early Portrait represents a moment of nascency; a first glimpse of an artist who would soon captivate the contemporary art scene with his ethereal, hallucinatory works. Early Portrait (Friend from Bryanston) sees Armitage use the canvas not only to immortalise his fellow student, but to explore and assert his own technical prowess.