Godwin Champs Namuyimba

Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Inner Circle, Ugandan artist Godwin Champs Namuyimba’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in France.

Namuyimba’s practice explores the ways that identity is constructed in a globalized and hyper-networked world, particularly within a postcolonial African context. In this new body of work, the artist appears to critically and equivocally grapple with the notion of Black Excellence – a conflictual term that on the one hand champions and celebrates the achievements and contributions of Black communities in a racialized society, while signifying, on the other, the disproportionate pressure Black individuals face to ‘work twice as hard to get half as far’.

Ten larger-than-life portraits comprise this cycle of paintings, constituting a sort of pantheon across the gallery walls. Measuring at around 250 x 200cm each, the works evoke a bodily response from the viewer, as though one were standing before real individuals. This subtle tactic draws us in, stoking our curiosity into these mysterious characters, who address us with their unflinching gaze from an array of richly patterned domestic interiors, rendered via many thin, watery layers of acrylic paint. Upon sustained observation, however, the viewer may notice that the architectural perspectives are ever so slightly skewed. The realistically depicted scenes of African domesticity that we easily took for granted begin to fragment and flatten. The compositions take on a collage-like quality, an apt metaphor for personal identity that at first glance appears singular and legible, but is in fact infinitely complex and kaleidoscopic, contradictory and ever-evolving.

This idea is echoed through the artist’s choice of subject matter, as well. The reference material for Namuyimba’s fictional figures is sourced from images of white people on Pinterest, which he then transfigures and situates in settings derived from his surroundings in Uganda. Pinterest is a website built on and fueled by people’s aspirations for every aspect of their lives: from their homes and weddings to their wardrobes and cosmetic surgery. Many of the trending lifestyle #aesthetics that proliferate on social media like Pinterest are overwhelmingly incarnated by white and affluent people, which reinforces distorted norms, and even fabricates desire and longing for a certain unattainable existence. The title of the exhibition, Inner Circle, evokes this exclusive, aspirational air, while also alluding to the ways that imposed beliefs about identity, and the incongruence between how we are perceived and how we see ourselves, are often deeply internalized.

The artist plays with this duality: the subjects are recognizable but chimeric, drawing us close but then not any closer. The oblique symbols borrowed from Christian and Egyptian iconography that recur throughout his paintings – both diegetically, worked into the wallpaper of Majesty (2022), or diagrammatically, as seen in the backgrounds and borders framing Open Window (2022) and The Naked Esteem (2022) – reinforce this sense of the profound unknowability of the other, and potentially, even ourselves.

Godwin Champs Namuyimba (b.1989, Masaka Uganda) lives and works in Masaka, Uganda. He earned his BFA from Kyambogo University, Kampala, Uganda in 2017. Solo exhibitions include: ‘Rocker Room’, Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg, 2022); ‘Antechamber’, East-Projects (New York, US 2021); ‘Godwin Champs Namuyimba’, Ars Belga (Brussels, BE 2021); and ‘The Dreamer’, Galleri Steinsland & Berliner Gallery (Stockholm, SE 2019). Recent group exhibitions include:

‘Summertime’, Zidoun Bossuyt Gallery (Luxembourg, 2021); ‘Dreamsongs – From Medicine to Demons to Artificial Intelligence’, Colnaghi Gallery (London, UK 2020); ‘June Invitational’, Ars Belga (Brussels, BE 2020); ‘L’Afrique fantôme’, Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris, FR 2020); and ‘Demifigures’, Laloma Projects (Los Angeles, LA 2020). In 2021, Namuyimba was a resident at Stjarna.art in Brussels, Belgium. His work is held in the collections of MUDAM - The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg; The W Art Foundation, Qingdao, Shanghai, Hong Kong; the Örebro City Library, Örebro, Sweden; and The Bunker Art Space, Beth Rudin de Woody Collection, West Palm Beach, USA.