The Brooklyn Rail

For many years Michael Armitage has employed Ugandan Lubugo bark cloth as the surface material for his paintings, a textile traditionally used for many purposes, including funerary rituals. The fabric’s natural imperfections, stitching, and wrinkles disrupt the uniformity of the surface, so oil paint applied over it takes on a distinct character the artist leverages to perfect a colorfully disarticulated style of representation. A national of both Kenya and England, Armitage has located past subject matter in the part of Africa he hails from. In Crucible the photographic material he draws from originates in Saharan Africa, the large region in the northern part of the continent with a substantially long, continuous, and violent history of migration in every direction across its immense desert terrain and out into the Atlantic Ocean. In his customary style, however, Armitage is not making work about migration in this region alone; rather, he is aiming for a more general representation of the migrant’s journey that ideally links this particular to the universal. Pictures like Don’t Worry There Will Be More (2024) and Bound (2025) acutely show circumstances like the danger of capture for those who are stateless and without protection as they cross the land through different countries. These are paired with other ambiguous scenes where figures decompose into the ground, or images of everyday life are made strange by the painted surface. Chang’aa (2024) depicts a group of people brewing a traditional Kenyan spirit. Three Fates (2024) shows a man lying next to a dog as three women prepare food in the background between a terraced structure and a cemetery.

In an adjacent gallery, Armitage has included selections from a new series of wood-carved reliefs cast in patinated bronze: 1: The Trial (2025), 13: The Descent (2025), 10: Stripped (2025), and 12: Eli Eli Sabachthani (2025). Literally and figuratively, these are dark representations of anguish and death. 12: Eli Eli Sabachthani—which, according to the Bible, is the Aramaic phrase Christ called out from the cross, translating to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—particularly seems to resound as the universal migrant’s plea.

Among all the paintings in the exhibition, the most unsettling are Raft (i) (2024) and Raft (ii) (2024). They depict bodies being swallowed by the sea, where a sense of depth permeates the field of vision without horizon. These paintings, more than the others, represent plainly the potential dangers ahead for those attempting to make their way to far away lands. Armitage was thinking of travel from Saharan Africa to Europe as he made these works, including a most treacherous route via the Canary Islands from West Africa, which continues to be active. Just this month, the Associated Press reported on several incidents of Pakistani migrants paying upwards of $17,000 for smugglers to facilitate their travel to Europe. A group expecting a plane flight and visa instead found themselves crossing the ocean in a fishing boat via this passage, a tragic voyage where more than forty of the eighty-five passengers on the overcrowded vessel perished.

Every continent has these networks of travel, which run unidirectionally for those desperate to escape persecution, genocide, ecological collapse, and war. Crucially, this is a representation of the poor person’s migration, for those without access to visas. These are not the fortunate few, like Armitage, who can travel between continents at will. Armitage’s pictures just as easily conjure travel to the United States by land and sea from Mexico to California and from Cuba and the Caribbean to Florida.

At the risk of reaching too quickly for low-hanging fruit, I am tempted to say that Crucible is exceptionally timely, especially as immigration enforcement under the Trump administration is now aggressively dedicated to rounding up both undocumented people and those with visas who have sought asylum in the US. But where should we locate this timeliness? What at one moment and in one place might be timely is untimely or obscure the next, and the time scales that define such overlaps depend on the media ecosystems that establish them to gain legitimacy. In other words, timeliness is cheap. It does more justice to consider Armitage’s work outside of time, in the fraught terrain of the universal. For better or worse, Armitage fashions a sense of timelessness in his paintings, even as he radically ties his figures to specific places and times.