Discover the radiant, textured paintings of Christina Kimeze at the South London Gallery, her first solo exhibition in the UK.
The South London Gallery (SLG) is delighted to present London-based artist Christina Kimeze’s first institutional solo exhibition, opening at the SLG, 31 January – 11 May 2025.
Kimeze’s paintings depict often lone female figures, immersed in natural landscapes or set within abstracted interiors distilled to focus on patterns or isolated architectural features, such as arched doorways and spiral staircases. The protagonists are based on the artist's friends, family, and sometimes herself, in works which she says, 'belong to a new exploration of the idea of existing between two emotional spaces and the feelings of "otherness" that can arise from this space'.
The work explores themes of interiority, belonging and ideas of home. Evoking the feeling of nostalgia and remembering in her work, at times Kimeze has drawn on memories of visiting her father's home country of Uganda. The scenes she creates are often set against richly coloured foliage, capturing the heat of the country. She is also inspired by a broad range of literary references including a number of Black, feminist 20th-century writers. Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, lending the paintings a distinctive luminosity and texture created using dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas.
For her SLG exhibition, Christina Kimeze has created a new body of work to be shown in the Main Gallery. Originally inspired by the resurgent popularity of roller skating in Black communities in London and beyond, they 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. 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.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new, hard-backed catalogue, designed by ‘A practice for everyday life’.
Listings
31 January – 11 May 2025
Free exhibition, Main Gallery & Fire Station Galleries
Further Information: Christina Kimeze - South London Gallery