Christina Kimeze
Long loops
28 June – 4 October
West Hollywood
For her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, British artist Christina Kimeze will present new paintings that explore what she calls ‘the in-between spaces’ where boundaries between interior life and shared experience blur and evolve.
Kimeze’s canvases depict ethereal landscapes and enigmatic figures, some solitary and others intimately connected. Tactility is an essential element of these works; made on a foundation of suede matboard, they combine dry chalk, oil pastel and wet paints which Kimeze crushes into the fabric. This technique endows her paintings with an aura of indeterminacy that underscores the mutable nature of her subject matter.
The exhibition title is taken from the Thom Gunn poem, ‘The Life of the Otter, Tucson Desert Museum’ (1992), in which the late poet imagines the swift, circular movement of an otter underwater and likens the creature’s ‘Long loops’ and ‘figures of eight’ to those made by a ‘lithe skater.’ Gunn alternated figures and settings to illustrate a fluid symmetry between species, gestures and identities. Kimeze echoes this shapeshifting and circularity through representations of water and roller skating, which evoke themes of freedom, movement and flight. Kimeze also draws inspiration from the recent resurgence of roller skating in Black communities throughout the UK, including her own neighborhood in East London. The circular rink and spinning wheels suggest continuous motion set in deliberate contrast to the grounding presence of the rink’s traditional wooden flooring.
Across the exhibition, Kimeze’s paintings similarly recall the contradictory experience of being grounded while simultaneously soaring through space. The effect is heightened by the artist’s handling of materials: the absorbent suede matboard slows the painting process and introduces a sense of friction, reinforced by Kimeze’s adroit blending of dry and wet media.
Recurring motifs—abstracted foliage, architectural arches—give structure to Kimeze’s compositions while complicating the dynamic between private and shared spaces in each painting. Works such as ‘bloom how you must (I)’ (2025) and ‘bloom how you must (II)’ (2025), both employ the spiral staircase as a metaphor for the evolution of identity. These works take their title from another influential poem—Lucille Clifton’s ‘mulberry fields’ (2004)—that Kimeze understands as a call to recognize the many facets of the self. Throughout the exhibition, Kimeze’s figures remain partially concealed, embedded within dense surroundings or pushed to the edges of the picture plane, each populating dreamlike scenes that invite viewers to ponder their own interior landscapes.
‘Long loops’ follows Kimeze’s first UK solo exhibition at South London Gallery, ‘Between Wood and Wheel’ (31 January – 11 May 2025).
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About the Artist
Christina Kimeze
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 opened in 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.
Current Exhibitions
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