Christina Kimeze’s Paintings Capture “Sovereign Emotional States”

Christina Kimeze opens the door to her studio, situated in a former cardboard box factory in a far-flung part of east London. It is sweltering, which the artist says is preferable to the temperature during winter. “There’s no heating,” the 39-year-old explains. “I’ll wear two coats with hot water bottles stuffed down them. It’s ridiculous, when I’m painting quite lush imagery, or imagery that’s referring to heat, in these Arctic conditions.”

The 12 paintings that make up her new show, Long Loops, at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, are perfect examples of this sense of warmth and fecundity. In the large work that gives the exhibition its title, figures seem to speed and blur through a hallucinogenic jungle clearing. They are depicted in heightened reds, greens, golds, and pinks—pastels and oils applied to suede matboard. In Figures of Eight, someone bathed in lilac and yellow seems to be having a moment of ecstatic transcendence while roller skating. “I think there’s almost a religious aspect to it,” Kimeze says. “There are these sovereign emotional states that people are able to reach through things like skating or reading, and I suppose I’m just trying to capture some of that.”

The artist is an avid reader. The title of her show comes from a poem by Thom Gunn; another painting, Calypso Through Clingfilm, is a response to a poem by Akhera Williams, which was in turn inspired by one of Kimeze’s earlier paintings. Then there’s the book that lies near a huge stack of pastels and oil sticks; it’s called The Sovereignty of Quiet, by Kevin Everod Quashie. “He articulated a lot of ideas around spaces that are often found in solitude,” Kimeze says. “It’s moving away from the idea that Blackness needs to be something that has resistance attached to it. Actually, it can just be quiet. I made a lot of paintings in response to it.”

Brought up in West London, Kimeze loved to draw and paint since she was a child, although she didn’t come from a typically creative background. “My dad was a first-generation immigrant from Uganda,” she says. “He had a deli cafe, and he was a real character, everybody knew him. He died last year. My mum’s still around, we’re really close. She’s worked in different corporate places researching hospitality and leisure.” Partly to please her father, Kimeze thinks now, she studied biology at Oxford University—she didn’t think it was as important to study art, since “I always had the confidence that I would keep doing it.” She kept up the habit of making art throughout university, going to life drawing classes held in the local pub. For her biology degree, she majored in plants and the environment; now, nature suffuses her canvases. “Looking back, I can see how that feeds into my work,” Kimeze says.

She admires Louise Bourgeois, Lisa Brice, and Hurvin Anderson. “I like artists who introduce geometry into something more fluid,” she says. “That tension is something that I really like.” Kimeze says she grew up looking at Degas, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec; when she feels stuck, she goes to the National Gallery in London and draws one of their paintings. She shows me a pencil sketch of a Poussin that she recently made. “You’ve got Bacchus and the babies who are the next generation, being corrupted, drinking the wine and all the rest of it.”

After graduating from Oxford in 2007, Kimeze went into business with her sister, “a start-up making eyewear specifically designed for Afro facial features. I suppose that was me trying to move a little bit closer to having a creative outlet.” But it wasn’t until just after her first child was born that Kimeze took the plunge and decided to get on with what she’d always wanted to do. She applied to a postgraduate degree at the Royal Drawing School in London and started the course in 2021. “I was able to completely throw myself into it,” she says. “I loved it because it was a community of artists all learning from each other.”

It brought out the best in Kimeze—she won the Sir Denis Mahon award, an annual prize of £10,000 given to an artist at the Drawing School to help them continue their career. A curator invited her to participate in a group show called Interior, at Michael Werner gallery; that led to White Cube showing her work as part of its online gallery Introductions. Soon after, Kimeze had a solo show at the South London Gallery called Between Wood and Wheel, another title that speaks to her love of roller skating. Now she has the heavyweight backing of Hauser & Wirth.

Kimeze works nine to five in order to manage her childcare commitments (she has two kids, aged one and six). She listens to disco, dub reggae, or the Congolese music that reminds her of her father—for example, the song Azda, by Franco Luambo. “My dad used to play it while driving me to school,” she says. “I was making the paintings in this show around the time that my dad was very ill. I often feel that the works are referencing something of memory and there’s a nostalgic quality to them. There’s a certain amount of world-building and understanding of place through family.”

This can be seen in the matoke banana leaf which grows in Uganda and occasionally crops up in Kimeze’s work as a motif. “That’s quite a specific reference to my family,” she says. Yet these deep seams of private emotion become universal through the quality of her painting, even though she says many of her experiments don’t work out.

“What’s key for me is just turning up every day and making,” Kimeze says. “What keeps the work fresh is the sense of it teetering on the edge of failure. That’s what I’m interested in.”