Everything that I am
Evans Mbugua is a visual artist whose work reflects a life lived across cultures. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, and based in France since 1999, he builds a vibrant visual language shaped by personal memory, cultural hybridity, and human connection.
His paintings combine colorful, hand-designed patterns created from pictograms gathered over years of travel and observation with portraits of family and friends in moments of joy, play, and everyday intimacy. As Mbugua says, “everything that I am comes from what I’ve smelled, tasted, heard or seen, what I’ve read, where I’ve been, who I’ve met.”
Through this interplay of form, rhythm, and experience, his work becomes a celebration of presence. It affirms people, places, and the quiet complexity of belonging in a constantly evolving world.
Exhibitions 2025
RECONSTRUCTED IDENTITIES
28 March — 10 May
Galerie La La Lande – Paris, France.
Evans Mbugua constructs his portraits, born of fortuitous and memorable encounters, in synthetic stained glass panels, bathed in a sparkling pointillism that liberates light and color, but also imprints the complexity and intermittency of human relationships on his works.
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The isolated dot evokes the socially disintegrated individual, disconnected from both the other and their environment, while the assembled dots form a tapestry rich in contrasts and diversity. These portraits therefore do not reflect a single identity, but rather a hybridization of identities that compose the individual and the society they live in.
These figures are adorned with motifs, pictograms carrying a universal meaning, which unite beyond linguistic barriers, like this open eye, a symbol of awakening and collective clairvoyance. The motif is repeated in a curtain of bronze sculptures suspended from chains of colored beads acting here as a plastic equivalent of the dot, and whose threading once again signifies the solidarity of individuals.
In a previous version, these portraits had already been exhibited, but existed within the confines of an enclosed frame, one to be transcended, to be abolished. In an act of a certain violence, aimed at denouncing the capitalist, colonialist, fascist, and ultimately warmongering forces that tend to assign us an identity and shatter solidarity, Evans destroys his own works, carving into the material, cutting them into pieces, so as to reconstruct them using wire staples, restorative sutures that represent retrieved bonds.
Finally, the artist recycles and assembles the scraps of these « cutouts » or « découpes », in the Matissean sense, to create new forms of life, animal, plant and pictographic. From the debris of this destruction, a regenerated ecosystem is reborn, carrying a hope ready to awaken.
Aurélien Simon / Galerie La La Lande, Paris.
SOLO / DUO EXHIBITIONS (selection)
2025
RECONSTRUCTED IDENTITIES: Galerie La La Lande – France.
2022
POINTS DE DEPART (Biennale de Dakar Off): Galerie Arte – Senegal.
2021
FLOWER POWER: Galeria OOA – Spain.
2020
TU M’ES INDISPENSABLE: Galerie Regard Sud – France.
FREEDOM IS MINE !: Galeria OOA – Spain.
2019
A SPECTACULAR NOW: Circle Art Gallery – Kenya.
2018
PORTRAIT TIRÉ: Galerie Emmanuelle Rousse – France.
TRESORS D’AFRIQUE: Maison Chaumet – France.
2017
DIALOGUE: Gallery of African Art (GAFRA) – UK.
HIGHLIFE: Galerie Art-Z – France.
2016
STYLE FUSION: Gallery of African Art – UK.
EVANS MBUGUA: Art-Z – France.GROUP EXHIBITIONS (selection)
2025
RECONSTRUCTED: Cape Town art fair / Galerie La La Lande – France.
2024
LESSONS IN SELFHOOD: ArtMadrid Art fair / Galeria OOA – Spain.
2023
WE ARE ENOUGH: 193 Gallery - France.
2022
19th ASIAN ART BIENNALE: National Art Gallery of Bangladesh.
FLOWER POWER: Galeria OOA (Spain) / SCOPE Art Show (Miami) USA.
2021
PRESENT TENSE: Loft Art Gallery (Morocco) / 1-54 Art fair (London) UK.
FLOWER POWER: Galeria OOA (Spain) / ArtxLagos – Nigeria.
DES PORTRAITS ET DES HOMMES: Festival Rio Loco Toulouse – France.
2020
METAMORPHOSES: Galerie Emmanuelle Rousse – France.
ASPIRING: ArtCo Gallery – Germany.
2019
BODY TALK: 1-54 Art Fair / London: Loft Art Gallery (Morocco) – UK.
BEIRUT ART FAIR: Galeria OOA (Spain) – Lebanon.
NAIROBI, HERE WE ART !: Galeria OOA – Spain.
CAPE TOWN ART FAIR: ArtCo Gallery – South Africa.
2018
BACK TO THE FUTURE: GAFRA Gallery – 1-54 Art fair UK.
FNB JOBURG ART FAIR 2018: ArtCo Gallery – South Africa.
BODY TALK: ArtCo Gallery – ART PARIS FAIR France.
2017
EXODE: Galerie Emmanuelle Rousse – France.
MY COLLECTION: MoCADA museum – USA.
THE ARTBALL 2017: Amref Health Africa – USA.
2016
CARTES ET IDENTITÉS: Galerie Art-Z – France.
2015
AFRIQUES À VENIR: Galerie ko21 – France.PERFORMANCE
2023
NOUS CRÉONS L’HISTOIRE: BISO Biennale, Burkina Faso.
2018
BODY TALK (Smail Kanouté & Wanjiru Kamuyu): Art Paris artfair - France.
2016
ETAT D’URGENCE: Galerie de la Voûte – France.
RESIDENCIES
2023
LE FEU DES ORIGINES: BISO Biennale, Burkina Faso.
2020
PRINTMAKING: Atelier Le Grand Village – France.
2019
TRANSLATION [DES PAS ET DES MOTS]: Espaço Luanda Arte – Angola.
2018
PORTRAIT TIRÉ: Galerie Emmanuelle Rousse – France.
2016
2ÉME ART’RIMAL: Galerie d’Art d’Oujda – Morocco.
EDUCATION
2005
École supérieure d’art et de design des Pyrénées: BA Graphic Design.
PRESS (selection)
RFI – L’artiste Evans Mbugua, ou l’Afrique émotionnelle…
REUTERS – Dancers portraits come alive at Paris Art Fair
WHITEWALL – Chaumet Collaborates with Kenyan artist Evans Mbugua