
Everything that I am
Evans Mbugua was born in Kenya where he happily lived until the age of nineteen. In 1999, he moved to France where he has resided ever since. His cultural identity is a combination of growing up in his African, anglophone country of birth and navigating adult life in his western, francophone adopted home. His artistic expression explores the experience of this hybrid identity.
Born of keen awareness of his surroundings and sensitive to the complexity of human relationships, Evans’ work explores the connections between people(s) and places. “Everything that I am comes from lived experiences – what I’ve smelled, tasted, heard or seen, what I’ve read, where I’ve been, who I’ve met…”. He creates visual memories as a way to affirm presence and links of existence.
Exhibitions 2025
RECONSTRUCTED IDENTITIES
28 March — 10 May
Galerie La La Lande – Paris, France.
Presentation text
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.
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.
Open CV - Exhibitions (selection)
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