Discover Christina Kimeze at the South London Gallery

Peckham’s South London Gallery (SLG) will present Christina Kimeze’s first solo exhibition next month.

Ms Kimeze is a London-based painter whose work has often explored the lives of lone female figures.

Her mysterious, dreamlike scenes often feature natural landscapes or abstracted interiors with arched doorways or spiral staircases where her characters can be found submerged in the bath, ambling down the stairs, or surrounded by nature.

The protagonists are based on the artist’s friends, family, and sometimes herself, in works that explore the agency of being alone.

Through her works, Ms Kimeze explores themes of belonging and ideas of home, taking references from black, feminist 20th-century writers and her memories of visiting her father’s home country of Uganda. 

For her SLG exhibition, Ms Kimeze has created a new body of work to be shown in the Main Gallery. 

Inspired by a resurgent popularity of roller skating in London’s black communities, these new pieces explore ideas of movement, flight and freedom. 

Unusual surface materials are an important part of Ms Kimeze’s practice. Her paintings have a soft, velvet-like texture created using dry chalk, oil pastel and wet paint applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas. 

In the Fire Station galleries other new paintings and works on paper will be shown alongside a painted folding screen, as well as a newly commissioned tapestry made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. 

A showcase of Ms Kimeze’s work will be hosted by the SLG, in Peckham Road, from January 31 until May 11, 2025.

Pictured top: Christina Kimeze, Soaring, 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard (Picture: Christina Kimeze/Matthew Hollow)