Kuona Trust Gallery plays host to contemporary Kenyan art

He has barely been back from a one-man exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, and William Wambugu is hard at work preparing for his next show in Nairobi.

Fondly referred to as Willie, by friends, his Seats of Power did very well at the Roots Contemporary Gallery, in Europe, and is looking to have similar success in his show, which opens on Friday.

The tiny venue, Kuona Trust Gallery, is the perfect size for Wambugu to showcase his delicate and finely detailed drawings of African interiors, most of which were drawn in an A4 sketch book that he kept to himself for months before showing it to the Italian gallery owner and curator, Samantha Ripa di Meana.

The unassuming and shy Wambugu approached Ripa di Meana after a talk she gave on contemporary Russian and Chinese art at Kuona Trust one Tuesday afternoon, early last year. She wasn’t enthusiastic about his oil paintings but his drawings intrigued her.

A friendship was struck with the curator-art collector mentoring the young Kenyan artist who had recently moved from the GoDown to a studio space at Kuona, in Hurlingham.

Matatu
As a mentor, Ripa di Means shared a spate of art books and materials with the Class of 2005 Kenya Polytechnic graduate, who only drew in his spare time, as he worked as an IT specialist. He eventually opted to follow his true calling, a visual artist.

Apart from an apprenticeship with matatu artists and attending different art workshops Wambugu is mainly Self-taught.

His mentorship has been guided to develop his art. She’s helped him to mount several solo exhibitions, including one at the Belgian ambassador’s residence entitled Anthropology of Tools. It featured a series of black and white drawings of locally-made hand tools, including wheelbarrows and rakes, machetes and jembes (hoes).

One of his shows was in her spacious garage, in Westlands, which she transformed into a gallery, that she now calls Roots Space Nairobi.

Entitled Walks of Life, the exhibition was all about shoes, both his and Ripa di Meana, which she acquired while living in China, with her Russian husband and children.

Kuona

Wambugu’s exhibition in Brussels is what will be on show in Kuona, minus the drawings that he sold. Called Seats of Power, like the European one, it will mainly feature his meticulous drawings of African interiors including many of the items you typically find in most middle-class Kenyan homes, such as sofas covered in embroidery, coffee tables, brooms, shoes and everyday life necessities.

“What I appreciate about William is the way he takes a topic and interrogates it in detail,” said Ripa di Meana.

Some of the work is drawn on his A4 local paper, some on cardboard, and the rest on special art paper given to him by Ripa di Meana from France, India and China.

What impressed Ripa di Meana about Wambugu was his sincerity and obvious desire to grow as an artist, his creative use of cardboard boxes, which she gave him to work with before introducing him to the hand-made paper.

The cardboards were were cleverly transformed into three-dimensional versions of the drawings of Kenyan interiors that he first showed her from his sketch book.

Those same boxes were part of a small exhibition that she organized at Le Rustique restaurant, shortly before they went off to Brussels, in June. At least one of them will be in the Kuona show.

Wambugu’s solo exhibition at Kuona Trust will be on for three weeks. Prices of his drawing range from Sh10,000 to Sh130,000. His creatively constructed 3-D cardboard box interiors are Sh150,000 .