LONDON.- The South London Gallery is presenting London-based artist Christina Kimeze’s first institutional solo exhibition.

Kimeze’s paintings depict often lone female figures, immersed in natural landscapes or set within abstracted interiors distilled to focus on patterns or isolated architectural features, such as arched doorways and spiral staircases. The protagonists are based on the artist's friends, family, and sometimes herself, in works which she says, 'belong to a new exploration of the idea of existing between two emotional spaces and the feelings of "otherness" that can arise from this space'.

The work explores themes of interiority, belonging and ideas of home. Evoking the feeling of nostalgia and remembering in her work, at times Kimeze has drawn on memories of visiting her father's home country of Uganda. The scenes she creates are often set against richly coloured foliage, capturing the heat of the country. She is also inspired by a broad range of literary references including a number of Black, feminist 20th-century writers. Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, lending the paintings a distinctive luminosity and texture created using dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas.

For her SLG exhibition, Christina Kimeze has created a new body of work to be shown in the Main Gallery. Originally inspired by the resurgent popularity of roller skating in Black communities in London and beyond, they explore broader ideas around movement, flight and freedom. These expressive works evoke sensations of the body moving through space, and how those feelings might be conjured in the mind's eye. In the Fire Station galleries other new paintings and works on paper are shown alongside a newly commissioned tapestry made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new, hard-backed catalogue, designed by ‘A practice for everyday life’. This beautifully illustrated book will bring together images of paintings made in recent years alongside a selection of smaller works on paper. It offers a space to reflect on Christina Kimeze's practice to date and discover her new body of work, shown for the first time at the South London Gallery. The catalogue will feature essays by curator and writer Ekow Eshun; Eleanor Nairne, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and a conversation between the artist and Alayo Akinkugbe, writer, art historian and founder of Instagram platform, @ABlackHistoryOfArt.

Christina Kimeze lives and works in London. Kimeze studied at The Royal Drawing School postgraduate programme 2021-2022 where she was awarded the Sir Denis Mahon award; and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford in Biological Sciences.

Recent exhibitions include: Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists, Freud Museum, London (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room (2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024); Present Tense, Hauser and Wirth, Bruton (2024); Something other than the world might know, White Cube, Paris (2023); Interior, Michael Werner Gallery, London (2023); and The Great Women Artists IV, Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2022).