Christina Kimeze (b. 1986) lives and works in London. She received a postgraduate degree from The Royal Drawing School in London, UK, and in 2022, she was awarded the Sir Denis Mahon Award. Prior to this, Kimeze completed an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford, UK.
Replete with expressive materiality, Kimeze’s works invite the viewer’s contemplation in a parallel to the introspection of the figures who are protagonists in her paintings. As Kimeze says, ‘I return to the idea of this intimate inner life and how we spend most of our lives just with ourselves and with our own thoughts.’
Recurring motifs, abstracted foliage and architectural arches, create delineation within the works and are means for Kimeze to blur the lines between the personal and public, individual and collective. In seeking to evoke unseen interior realms, Kimeze draws from a reservoir of memories and human experience. Richly colored foliage that reappears often in her work summons glimpses of her father’s home country of Uganda. The artist also mines such sources as 20th-century feminist and contemporary writers and films. More recently, Kimeze has shifted her focus to the subject of movement, flight and freedom, referencing the resurgence of roller skating in Black communities in London and the US and exploring folkloric accounts of mystical women.
Tactility is an essential element of Kimeze’s practice; freedom is expressed not only through subject matter but also her experimentation with surface texture and material effect. Working on napped suede or velvet canvases, Kimeze combines dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints, applying, crushing and merging them into the fabric. This technique imbues her works with a sense of the temporal—of time passing, of transience and indeterminacy. As writer and academic Kevin Quashie, author of ‘The Sovereignty of Quiet,’ has observed, ‘its gauze inflecting its capacity to gaze upon the image. Its tender layering which makes me think of another meaning of the word tender, which makes me think about material and materiality.’
Kimeze’s recent exhibitions include ‘Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists,’ Freud Museum, London, UK (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room, London, UK (2024); ‘Soulscapes,’ Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK (2024); ‘Present Tense,’ Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK (2024); ‘Something other than the world might know,’ White Cube, Paris, France (2023); ‘Interior,’ Michael Werner Gallery, London, UK (2023); and ‘The Great Women Artists IV,’ Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2022).
Kimeze’s forthcoming solo exhibition ‘Christina Kimeze. Between Wood and Wheel’ at South London Gallery opens on 31st January 2025 and is accompanied by a monograph that brings together images of paintings made in recent years alongside a selection of works on paper. This book features new writing 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 between the artist and Alayo Akinkugbe, writer, art historian and founder of Instagram platform @ ABlackHistoryOfArt. Kimeze’s first solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth will open in Los Angeles in summer, 2025.
