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.
Open CV - Exhibitions (selection)
PRESS (selection)
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