Michael Armitage: Crucible

Highlighting powerful new paintings and sculptures by Michael Armitage, this catalogue showcases the artist’s poignant, timely, and profoundly humanistic works.

Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage’s work weaves real and imagined histories into powerful reflections on contemporary social and political life. Michael Armitage: Crucible presents a selection of recent works exploring journeys across borders and the broader experience of displacement. Many of the artist’s paintings on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which he has employed for more than a decade—depict scenes from a migration route stretching from the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe. These works, both intimate and epic, consider migration not only as movement across geography but as a condition that shapes identity, memory, and belonging.

The volume also features a series of bronze-relief sculptures inspired by the Stations of the Cross, reimagined to center migrants and the displaced—figures often marginalized within contemporary society—within a shared cultural and spiritual narrative. Armitage’s direct, emotionally charged imagery invites viewers to reflect on how migrants are seen, represented, and understood today.

Published to accompany the exhibition at David Zwirner New York, the catalogue includes an essay by Marina Warner on the role of myth in Armitage’s depictions of arduous journeys, and a text by geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro examining global and local patterns of migration. Two poems by Warsan Shire, including a newly commissioned work, offer lyrical responses to the themes of the artist’s practice.