Michael Armitage (b. 1984, Nairobi)

The Fourth Estate

2017, oil on lubugo bark cloth, 330 x 200 cm.

White Cube. © Courtesy Joyner/Giuffrida Collection and White Cube.

A purple tree with wide, bare branches, rises from the middle of a sea of heads on a hillside, with the skyscrapers of Nairobi in the distance. On the branches sit a number of people, some of them wearing green wigs and another carrying a banner with a frog painted on it.  As in The Promise of Change, the frogs symbolises Kenya’s political leaders who make meaningless promises to win votes.  Both that painting and this one are part of a series Armitage painted alluding to corruption during the country’s 2017 election campaign. The Fourth Estate also refers to Goya’s Ridiculous Folly where figures symbolising an exhausted Spanish nation perch in a tree, hanging on the words of a shadowy speaker.