Intangible Presences: Images Bridging Lives: Godwin Champs Namuyimba
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Primo Marella Gallery in Milano is pleased to present, on October 9th, Godwin Champs Namuyimba's lates solo show, entitled Intangible Presences: Images Bridging Lives.
Born in 1989 in Masaka, Uganda, Godwin Champs Namuyimba is considered one of the most compelling voices of the new generation of African contemporary painters. After completing his BFA at Kyambogo University in Kampala in 2017, he rapidly gained international attention, exhibiting in Europe, the United States, and Asia, with works now held in important private and public collections, including the Mudam - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg.
Namuyimba's practice revolves around the human figure as a means to question identity, individuality, and the social constructs shaping everyday life in postcolonial Africa. His portraits, often monumental and saturated with vivid, contrasting colors, suspend his subjects in spaces that are at once familiar and dreamlike. Faces, gestures, and postures are rendered with both raw intensity and delicate intimacy, offering the viewer a powerful narrative that moves beyond the canvas.
With "Intangible Presences: images bridging lives", Namuyimba reflects on the dual origin of his imagery-drawn both from found photographs circulating online and from lived, personal experience. Each painting becomes a bridge between these two dimensions: the virtual and the real, inspiration and actuality. The figures that emerge on canvas are not only products of imagination, but also witnesses to the tangible realities of postcolonial Africa. In this way, the artist's work turns images into narratives-where creativity transforms fragments of life into powerful, shared presences.
Namuyimba uses the human figure to tell stories about identity, race, and individual uniqueness, with a gaze turned toward today’s Africa in the wake of colonial experience. His works draw inspiration from Afrocentrism, a point of view that centers African culture, in contrast to traditional European perspectives, and often opens up to the idea of a possible, imagined, and desired future for the African continent. Through symbols, colors, and references to African life and tradition, Namuyimba enhances the identity of his own context, presenting a personal, strong, and independent interpretation. -
Godwin Champs Namuyimba, Serenity, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 110 cm
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From a painterly perspective, his canvases are dominated by bold, vibrant colors, applied with broad, decisive, and energetic brushstrokes. The perspectives he adopts are often distorted and vertiginous, creating an unsettling but intentional sense of disorientation. It is precisely in this tension between beauty and disorientation that the artist finds a form of involuntary poetry—a visual short circuit that opens up new spaces for interpretation. Namuyimba’s technique, favoring the use of acrylics on canvas, is characterized by a free and instinctive stroke, capable of powerfully evoking both the physicality of the subject and the emotional energy of the scene. At times, his brushwork recalls European Expressionism, but reimagined through an African lens that disrupts its visual grammar to assert an autonomous and original language. The compositions seem to invite us to enter the painting, to look around from unfamiliar points of view, as if we ourselves were present within the scene.
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Godwin Champs Namuyimba, Watcher, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 125 × 110 cm
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Works
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Installation Shots
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GODWIN CHAMPS NAMUYIMBA
Intangible Presences: Images Bridging Lives
Primo Marella Gallery Milano
opening
thursday, october 9Th, 2025
at 6 pm
