In summer 2025, Kunsthaus Bregenz is presenting an extraordinary artistic dialogue: on view in the foyer will be works by the British Kenyan painter Michael Armitage; the late Austrian painter, graphic artist, and filmmaker Maria Lassnig; and the Kenyan artist Chelenge Van Rampelberg.
The exhibition grew out of a conversation with Michael Armitage during preparations for his KUB exhibition in 2023. Armitage spoke about Maria Lassnig, whom he considers one of the most important painters of all time and a person who has had a lasting influence on him. Armitage cites his long-time mentor, teacher, and friend, the artist Chelenge Van Rampelberg, as another important influence. Now, in the summer of 2025, these three voices will engage in a multilayered dialogue at Kunsthaus Bregenz. The works were selected by Armitage himself.
Chelenge Van Rampelberg (b. 1961), like Armitage born in Kenya, is represented in the exhibition with woodcuts and wood sculptures: male heads with pointed mouths and upright female figures. They combine concentration and sensitivity, tension and dignity – such as in Eve I, 1996, an Eve with her head tilted to the side. Her woodcuts also tell of relationships – to nature, to animals, and to other people. Vulnerability and closeness are evident in the works’ soft contours. These are images of an existence that fluctuates between worry and hope.
On view from Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) are drawings that, like her paintings, look inward. They show the body not as an external form, but as a resonance chamber of feelings and a place of sensory perception. Rather than appearing isolated, people in her works are situated in relation to space, biography, and other beings. This is evident in works such as Einen Hund besitzen, 1976, a work from the Kunsthaus Bregenz collection. Here, Lassnig turns her gaze firmly toward the viewer. In her right arm she holds a dog – a companion, trophy, or mirror image.
In Michael Armitage’s (b. 1984) watercolors, we encounter pain and political tensions as well as great tenderness, especially toward animals. His brushstrokes in warm sepia testify to technical precision and a fine sense of perception. Thin layers of paint and shadows open up spaces that are both vulnerable and alive. In his painting Mydas, 2019, Armitage takes up a mythical theme: King Midas, whose greed-driven wish that everything he touches turns to gold ultimately leads to his downfall. A naked male figure looks down toward a mother wrapped in golden fabric and her child, as he himself is watched by a hyena that seems to be surveying the scene from another world. What connects Van Rampelberg, Lassnig, and Armitage is an interest in human beings – their bodies, their relationships, their existence in the world – which each of the three artists approaches from a different standpoint and renders in sensitive depictions. These varied perspectives come together in a special way at Kunsthaus Bregenz.
The exhibition, curated in collaboration with Michael Armitage, is being organized in cooperation with the Maria Lassnig Foundation in Vienna and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI).
Accompanying the show and currently in the works is a KUB publication exploring questions of identity, physicality, and artistic experience across continents and generations.
For more information, click here.
