Michael Armitage tells urgent stories in art
The use of colour and perspective in his new show is startling
Invited three years ago to create a body of work for the Kunsthalle in Basel, where a seminal early Picasso show was put on in 1914, Michael Armitage quickly decided to fill one of its galleries with paintings of people with their eyes shut. They are variously daydreaming, fast asleep or comatose after sniffing glue. “It was just a very simple idea,” he explains. “It ended up being somewhere between death and life and something imagined.”
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Eyes wide shut”
From the July 2nd 2022 edition
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