ART SCENE: An artist in protest against injustices yet to be rectified

Artist Sebastian Kiarie with his painting titled 'The Bull and the Egg.' Kiarie's exhibition is ongoing in October 2015 at Banana Hill Art Gallery in Nairobi. PHOTO| MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

What you need to know:

  • In his current solo exhibition, Kiarie displays both scathing social commentaries and gentle, soulful works that reflect earlier days before he realised that artists ought to speak their minds through their art.

  • Those gentler moments can be seen in works like ‘The Blessed Ones’ (from 1992) and ‘Mother and Child’ (2012).

In his recently opened one-man exhibition at Banana Hill Art Gallery, the award-winning painter Sebastian Kiarie reveals himself in a new light.

He has become a sharp-eyed symbolist whose artistic substance and style has shifted significantly since he first won the ‘most promising artist of the year’ award in 1995.

In fact, Kiarie’s art has been evolving steadily ever since this self-taught painter arrived on the local art scene in the early 1990s. Coming from Egerton University, Kiarie’s first encounters with art had been in the local butcheries and bars in Ngecha where he’d grown up.

So intrigued with ‘bar art’ was Kiarie that sought out the painter and asked if he could be mentored by him. The older man agreed and showed him the basics of painting.

Kiarie has come a long way since then when he worked as a farm hand to raise funds to buy art materials and then hawk his first artworks along Limuru Road.

Since then, he has not only won major awards both at home and abroad, he has also had exhibitions everywhere from Asia and Europe to the US and Africa.

In his current solo exhibition, Kiarie displays both scathing social commentaries and gentle, soulful works that reflect earlier days before he realised that artists ought to speak their minds through their art.

Those gentler moments can be seen in works like ‘The Blessed Ones’ (from 1992) and ‘Mother and Child’ (2012).

SOMETHING CHANGED

But something changed between then and now.  Kiarie’s newest works are deeper, more symbolic. Now, he uses his art as a means of making social commentaries, protesting social ills that he feels are inundating the country.

That penchant to protest is best seen in works infused with symbolism, such as ‘The Machete Story,’ ‘I love my Mother Land’ and ‘The Bull and the Egg.’

Of the three, the one reflecting the most scathing irony is ‘I Love my Mother Land.’ In it, naked beggar is seated with his beggar bowl, holding a European Union flag. Behind the flag are do-gooders out to ‘save Africa’ although there’s also ‘oil’ on their agenda.

‘The Machete Story’ is also symbolic. He has lined up a dozen actual pangas (the kind used during post-election violence of 2007-80) on a table behind which stand four headless men and one empty seat - the seat of justice, he says.

“It’s my way of protesting the fact that nobody’s been held accountable for killing over 1000 Kenyans,” Kiarie told Saturday Nation, clearly disturbed by the appalling treatment of Kenyans by fellow Kenyans.

“I’m suggesting the machetes are the only ones to speak on behalf of the victims. They’re the evidence of travesties done in the past and could continue if justice isn’t served,” he said.

But the most poignant painting for me is ‘The Bull and the Egg’ which hangs at the gallery entrance. Kiarie’s powerful bull commands nearly the whole canvas, apart from a small portion where an innocent egg is ready to hatch.

It’s the bull’s anxious expression as he gazes at the egg that makes the painting so poignant. “The bull is like so many African leaders that fear being displaced in the future by whatever emerges from the egg,” Kiarie said. “That fear of the future is what drives dictators to smash the innocent rather than to see [and trust] what they will become.”

The one crowning painting in Kiarie’s show is a reminiscence on Gallery Watatu, the old art space where he got his start in CBD’s then thriving art world.