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The Promise of Change (March 29–January 10, 2027), curated by Jean-Marie Gallais in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Caroline Bourgeois, and Michelle Mlati, brings together over 150 works, including large-scale paintings and drawings, outlining a journey through the last decade of the artist’s practice.
The exhibition unfolds as an exploration of an unstable pictorial territory, where personal memory and collective history intersect with a rich, symbolic imaginary. References to East Africa—and particularly Kenya—interweave with classical mythology and the Western figurative tradition, producing dense, chromatically vibrant compositions, often of monumental scale. Armitage addresses urgent contemporary issues: wars, political instability, abuses of power, migration crises, and identity tensions. These themes are not illustrated in a literal sense; rather, they are embedded within the very structure of the images, populated by figures in motion, set within landscapes that oscillate between recognizability and hallucination.
At Palazzo Grassi, the visitor is gradually guided through these inhabited scenarios, sometimes tied to specific historical contexts, sometimes deliberately ambiguous. Scenes thicken and blur, embracing multiple narrative horizons, inviting the viewer to an active engagement with the work.

Armitage’s painting alternates between incisive gestures and passages of extreme delicacy, building surfaces in which the chromatic material seems to come alive, retaining traces of conflict, desire, and memory. The artist emphasizes the need for painting that can engage with historical reality without sacrificing formal complexity or lyrical tension. His iconography emerges from a multiplicity of sources: news, literature, cinema, local rituals, colonial and modern architecture, and the global history of art. Mythological figures coexist with characters drawn from contemporary African literature or with anonymous individuals, as in the series devoted to migration, where journey and crossing take on both concrete and symbolic significance.
Influences ranging from the cinema of Sembène Ousmane to the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and from the painting of Francisco Goya and Diego Velázquez, are reworked into a personal visual language, in which chromatic intensity and spatial construction testify to a constant dialogue with tradition.

A distinctive element of his practice is the use of a support made from tree bark, following Ugandan and Indonesian traditions. This material, marked by irregularities and fractures, directly influences the composition, guiding the placement of figures and the distribution of colors. The painted surface is created through a process of layering: successive applications of oil, scraping, and reworking generate effects of depth and transparency.
The result is a sensitive texture in which light seems to filter through the material. A large section devoted to drawing allows visitors to explore the works’ design phase, revealing a careful attention to detail and image construction. Sketches and preparatory studies show how the monumentality of the paintings is preceded by analytical work on composition and the dynamics of the figures.