Michael Armitage

Michael Armitage (born 1984) is a British artist who was born in Kenya. In May 2022, the Royal Mint announced that he would design a new £1 coin for the United Kingdom, to be issued in 2023. He grew up in Nairobi, living there until he was 16. He began drawing at age 6, and a few years later he was encouraged by his art teacher to continue with art.

At age 16, Armitage left Kenya to attend boarding school in England.

Career Armitage began as an abstract painter. In 2014, Armitage began to paint on lubugo, a Ugandan ficus tree bark cloth, rather than traditional canvas. One of these early lubugo paintings was Kampala Suburb, which depicts two men kissing "in the style of an Egyptian hieroglyphic". Armitage painted the piece after speaking to one of his sister's friends about the friend's experience as a gay man in Kenya, where homosexuality is illegal. In 2016, Armitage had his first solo exhibition in the United States at the University of California's Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. That same year, Armitage had a solo show of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. In November 2019, one of Armitage's works, "The Conservationists" (2015), was brought to auction at Sotheby's, making it the first of Armitage's paintings to be auctioned; it sold for more than US$1.5 million. Armitage also selected 70 works by 20th-century figurative East African artists to be included in the show. A scaled-down version of the exhibition was brought to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2021.

Style Armitage paints on lubugo cloth, rather than traditional linen canvas, in order to ground his work in East African culture and history. He has said Kenya and Kenyans are his primary subject matter, and that he is not drawn to Britain for painting inspiration. when portraying Africa and other tropical regions.

Armitage has said that his paintings take time to complete, and that he'll sit with an idea for a year or more before painting it. Armitage painted the work during the pandemic, finishing it in 2022. It depicts four refuse collectors, whom the piece is named after, as well as paramedics moving a patient into an ambulance. According to Armitage, the piece "is about community and the workers in the community that go largely unseen". Arts Council Collection, London Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago National Galleries Scotland San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Zabludowicz Collection