March 2025 Group Show: Circle Art Gallery

Dickens Otieno (Kenyan, b. 1979)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Dickens Otieno’s tapestries use and draw attention to the potential beauty in objects that would otherwise be dismissed as useless, and discarded. Aluminium cans are shredded and woven into sculptural fabrics in a process informed by the weaving of natural materials such as papyrus, raffia or palm that he observed growing up. Otieno’s mother was a tailor and he spent many hours in her workshop amongst lesos and kitenges, whose colours and patterns have since influenced his aesthetic. This engagement with textile grows from an interest in the way pattern, colour and iconography are used to imbue functional objects with meaning and identity. Otieno draws on his immediate physical surroundings, particularly the urban environment in his native Nairobi, to create his compositions. Objects piled high in markets, the constantly shifting skyline, and the pockets of nature within the concrete and steel haze of the city, have become sources of inspiration for his richly hued, increasingly sculptural forms.

Otieno has had solo exhibitions in Kenya and the USA: Mtaani, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, 2021, Mabati Tailor, Circle Art Gallery, 2020 and Trails, Circle Art Gallery, 2023. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions locally and internationally including: East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021; See Here, Old Neals Auction House, Nottingham, 2018; Africa/Africa, Total Arts Courtyard Gallery, Al Quoz, Dubai, 2018; Young Guns, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2017; The Third Dimension, Circle Art Gallery, 2016; UNI-FORM MULTI-FORM, Roots Contemporary, Nairobi, 2016; Paint and Metal, National Museum of Nairobi, 2016. Otieno has exhibited at international art fairs including Art Dubai, Eye of the Collector, London, Circle Art Gallery, 2023 and Untitled Art Fair, Miami, Steve Turner Gallery, 2022. Residencies include the Tilleard Artist Residency in Lamu and a fellowship in Italy at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Sandra Wauye (Kenyan, b. 1996)

Lives and works in Mombasa

Sandra Wauye, a painter and ceramicist based in Mombasa, Kenya, attends to grief and trauma processing in her practice that unfolds at the intersection of community, cultural practices and healing rituals in contemporary society. Wauye’s expressive painting style in oil and oil pastel sticks features bold colours applied in thick loose strokes, and thinner controlled outlines, composing tableaus that fuse human and animal forms against vibrant, multi-coloured undefined environments.

In 2024, Wauye was one of three artists who participated in UJUZI, an artistic research and mentorship program with Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute and Untethered Magic which culminated in an exhibition at NCAI. She completed a residency at 32 Degrees East in Kampala in 2023, and in 2024 was a participating artist in the KLA ART Festival themed Care Instructions.

Mativo Mativo, (Kenyan, 1990) living and working in Syokimau, Kenya

Mativo’s work interrogates the socio-spatial dynamics of urban life, cultural identity and materiality. His practice is rooted in the architectural and infrastructural realities of cities, exploring the tensions between inclusion and exclusion, resilience and disposability. By transforming garbage plastic bags—a ubiquitous yet overlooked urban material, into canvases layered with expressive mark-making, Mativo reclaims, reconstructs and redefines the narratives embedded in Nairobi’s evolving landscape.

Mativo’s artistic vision was shaped by his childhood, navigating the contrasting geographies of Nairobi’s middle-class South B, the next-door Mukuru slums and occasional visits to Nairobi’s busy city centre, rare glances of Nairobi’s wealthy neighborhoods and rural Makueni. Moving between these spaces, he experienced the sharp divides and fluid connections between privilege and precarity, structure and improvisation. This duality remains central to his work, informing his study of how cities are built, who they serve, and what is discarded—both materially and socially. Through University and a deep engagement with urban theory and spatial justice, Mativo’s work engages with thinkers like Jane Jacobs and Achille Mbembe, as well as contemporary African artists including El Anatsui and Ibrahim Mahama. His practice is both a personal and political act, positioning garbage plastic bags - objects of transience, waste and necessity - as symbolic markers of survival, adaptation and resistance. The material’s fragility mirrors the impermanence of urban existence while its layered textures reflect the fractured, yet interconnected realities of those navigating the city’s shifting landscapes.

Mativo has a Diploma in Architecture from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. Solo exhibitions include Mirror Mirror - The Portraits of Being Alive, Alliance Française, Nairobi and Buried Butterflies, Montague Contemporary, New York in 2023. Group shows include; in 2023, African Abstraction II, Montague Contemporary, New York, USA, ArtAffair 23, One Off Contemporary Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya, Behind This Face 2 – Echoes of the Past, GravitArt Gallery, Nairobi and Tapestry of Contemporary African Art, Patchogue Arts Council & Museum of Contemporary Art, Long Island, in collaboration with Montague Contemporary in 2024.

James Kagima (Kenyan, b. 1998)

Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya

James Kagima is an artist and designer. At an early age, Kagima was drawn to Catholic religious art and symbolism as seen in the stained glass windows, sculptures and paintings in churches he and his family frequented. His early influences also stemmed from picture books and comics, influences still seen in his work today.

In 2016, as he pursued a degree in Architecture, Kagima also ventured into pencil portraiture, and through the Safari Mentoring Arts Program began to work in different media which he then incorporated into his practice.

He has previously exhibited at Art installation at the National Museum, Affordable art show in 2022 and 2020 at the national museum and the Postcard Africa group exhibition at Alliance Francais, Nigeria in 2022.

Sammy 'Squillah' Mutinda, (Kenyan,b. 1990)

Sammy Mutinda is a self-discovered contemporary visual artist hailing from the Mukuru slums on the outskirts of Nairobi. Raised in this marginalized community, Sammy’s passion for art developed early on. As a multidisciplinary artist, his work explores human behavior in relation to the environment, driven by spiritual, social, and political forces impacting humanity. Human figures are central to his art, which investigates how individuals navigate their connection or disconnection from reality, sometimes developing coping mechanisms that lead to self-destruction or healing for both humanity and all beings under the sun.

Sammy has actively participated in various art-oriented activities, including art facilitation at WajukuuArts Kids Club, workshops, and group exhibitions locally and internationally. Notable exhibitions include PRINT|PRINTS art collectives exhibition (Kibera art district 2025), Ecology X Posters for the Future (Kairos Futura 2025), Sasa Nairobi Artist Fellowship program Goethe institute (2024-2025), Before Our Homes Go Down (Wajukuu artist collective Group Exhibition 2024), Sonic Mass (Munyu Space), Water Residency Dream Kona & Goethe Institute, Fota 2024, Expressions in Colours (Under the Swahili Tree, Nairobi 2023). His work "Small Windows" was featured in the recent Documenta15 Festival (2022) in Kassel, Germany, as part of a group show with the WajukuuArts collective. Sammy also participated in the MATZA Edgelands WajukuuArts residency program, Informal Digitalities. His sculpture Digital Life was shortlisted for the Manjano Art Competition (2015), organized by GoDown Art Centre, Kuona Trust, and Wajukuu Arts.

Ethel Aanyu, (Ugandan, b. 1994)

Ethel Aanyu is a Ugandan photographer living and working in Kampala, Uganda. In 2018, she completed a BA in Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University. Aanyu’s approach to photography is two-pronged. Using a digital camera, she first makes portraits of herself and other sitters staging scenes that channel specific emotions. This is followed by the application of digital layering techniques to modify the portraits, primarily inverting, re-ordering and re-presenting black and white images, as well as some experiments with colour.

Aanyu describes the process and the final compositions as a visual portrayal of self-reflection and inner-conflict, sometimes calm and gentle, other times intense and heated. Grappling with hybrid cultures of language and rural and urban life, having grown up in Teso, Eastern Uganda, and moved to Kampala, as well as studying longer histories of the post-colonial condition in Uganda, Aanyu aims to carve out space, not for resolution, but rather one of comfort amidst the tension, ambiguity and hybridity of these events.

Aanyu was a participating artist in the Kampala Art Biennale, 2020, and in 2023 completed a residency at 32 Degrees East. She has exhibited widely in Uganda, and in 2024 participated in the Jauo Photo Festival, Tunis as well as the Investec CapeTown Art Fair. This is her first showing with Circle Art Gallery.

Tiemar Tegene (Ethiopian, b. 1994)
Lives and works in Addis Ababa

Tiemar Tegene’s works are anchored in her training as a printmaker, expanding etching processes into monoprinting through spontaneous experiments, most often using household items and their textures. Rather than producing numbered editions struck from the same plate, each work falls outside of fixed description as Tegene finds new ways to press the texture of an image through the application of ink onto the page. Additions of coloured pencil forge repeating icons and patterns, becoming increasingly abstracted whilst adding layers of personal narratives.

Channelling an intimate and complex response to the world around her, Tegene’s compositions are transmutations of her emotional experiences and the nature of her relationships with others. Inside these images live the details and echoes of larger stories, whether relayed in confidence by a friend, overheard on the street, or drawn from song lyrics or film. Consolidating ‘real’ details with flourishes of reference and imagination, her portraiture reaches for specific and consuming emotional moments, that ripple through the body and space.

Tegene received a BFA in Printmaking from the Allé School of Fine Arts & Design in Addis Ababa. Her work has been exhibited in Ethiopia at the National Museum of Ethiopia, Alliance Ethio-Francaise and at the Gebre Kristos Desta Centre, and internationally, at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and James Fuentes Gallery, New York, well as a series of public murals commissioned in the city of Addis Ababa. She has featured in the group exhibitions Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022 and Addis Contemporary II, Circle Art Gallery, 2021 and had a very successful solo exhibition at Circle in 2023 and a solo booth at the Cape Town Art Fair 2024.

Rasto Cyprian (Kenyan b. 2001)

Living and working in Nairobi

Rasto Cyprian is a graduate from Presbyterian University of East Africa where he studied Education Arts with a major in English and Literature.

His journey as an artist began in 2013 at twelve years old after he discovered an art program offered by the Uweza Foundation, a prominent NGO in Kibera where he grew up. After two years in the program, he developed enough confidence to begin painting on canvas. As his interest in art grew, Rasto sought out other art spaces in his local community to hone his skills and gain exposure to other artists, such as Onyis Martin, a mixed media artist.

His work is inspired by time and how people can actually travel through it and enjoy past moments. Besides Onyis Martin; Rasto has also been influenced by other artists such Francis Bacon and Chuck Close. Literature and the works of the old Italian masters also shape his work and technique.

Rasto’s creative process involves the reductive method as he scrubs off brush and pencil strokes, then goes back to add stencil and collage on top. He tends to embrace both vibrant and muted colors combined with a patterned background.

Tabitha wa Thuku (Kenyan b. 1963)

Lives and works in Nairobi

Born in the year of Independence, Tabitha Wa Thuku began her creative practice as a young, self-taught artist and one of the only female artists of her generation. Over a career of more than three decades, Wa Thuku has developed a painterly language unencumbered by convention, her works distinguished by a brooding palette which ranges from subtle browns to rich reds.

Wa Thuku originally studied Textiles and Clothing Technology at Kenya Polytechnic, then from 1996 to 1999 she attended the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts. She has undertaken various workshops and residencies to develop a wide range of techniques, demonstrated in her extensive body of work. In addition to her own artistic production, she has also worked as an art educator, teaching and mentoring children and young artists. Wa Thuku has exhibited regularly throughout her career in Kenya and abroad, including in The Netherlands, Italy, Hong Kong and Denmark. In 2022 her work was featured in a retrospective exhibition alongside Yony Waite and Theresa Musoke at Circle Art Gallery. Her work is included in private and public collections in Kenya, including those of the National Museum of Kenya, the Safaricom collection, PwC and MMC Africa Law.

Souad Abdelrassoul (Egyptian, b. 1974)
Lives and works in Cairo

Souad Abdelrassoul’s practice spans various media, incorporating drawing, painting, sculpture and graphic design. Working between the abstract and figurative, she intertwines human, animal and vegetal forms, believing we are all intrinsically connected to the earth. Tree-like figures with branching veins and arteries, and giant insect-like creatures, merge on her canvases to remind the viewer of the vital bond between our internal lives and the exterior world we live in.

Adopting a surrealist touch, Abdelrassoul’s paintings exalt in the feminine and the emotional. They explore the idea of the modern woman, informed by her own experiences of living within a patriarchal society. Many of her motifs address these issues, whilst also making reference to artists and practices that she admires. Reflecting on her experiences as a mother, Abdelrassoul draws attention to the ways women evolve and adapt in oppressive environments. Often using familiar myths and legends, she paints stories through her figures that question the roles women hold in society and cultural history in disruptive and thought-provoking ways. By reconceptualizing perceptions of space, she repurposes notions of form, science and nature into strikingly personal configurations.

Abdelrassoul graduated with a BFA in 1998 from El Minya University and in 2005 completed her master’s degree in History of Art. In 2012 she completed her PhD in Modern Art History. Since 1998 she has exhibited frequently in group and solo exhibitions in Cairo, as well in Nairobi, Beirut and the USA. Her recent exhibitions include: A Never Ending Longing, Cromwell Place, London, 2022; Behind the River, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2021; East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021. She has exhibited at international art fairs in London, Dubai, Marrakech and at The Armory Show in New York. In 2022 her painting The Magician (2021) was acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. She is also represented in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusettes, USA. Abdelrassoul features in 300 Great Women Painters published in 2022 by Phaidon Press. In 2022 her work was displayed on a banner outside the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre in London. In 2023 she had solo exhibitions in Cairo and in Dakar and she was a finalist in the Norval Sovereign Art Prize, Cape Town.

Shabu Mwangi (Kenyan b. 1985)
Lives and works in Nairobi

Shabu Mwangi’s third solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery presents new works made in oil on canvas and steel over the past 18 months. In these paintings, Mwangi continues to survey emotional and psychological landscapes within himself and in society to create densely layered semi-abstracted compositions. Mwangi is concerned with the effects of structural violence in historical and contemporary contexts particularly those brought about by the farce of democracy and globalization, the isolation of capitalism and the severed interdependence that human beings have with each other and the world we inhabit.

Mwangi has lived and worked in Mukuru, an informal settlement in Nairobi where he co-founded the Wajukuu Art Project in 2013. In 2023, he was a finalist for the Access Art X Prize in the Africa/Diaspora category. In 2022 Mwangi and fellow members of the Wajukuu Art Project participated in Documenta 15 in Kassel, where they went on to win the Arnold Bode prize. He also participated in the 13 Biennial do Mercosul in Brazil, 2022. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Self Addressed, curated by Kehinde Wiley for Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; Systems to Emptiness, a prelude to Documenta 15, 2022; A Never Ending Longing, Circle Art Gallery, Cromwell Place, London, 2022; The Sources of Our Seas, Circle Art Gallery, 2021; East African Encounters, Cromwell Place, London, 2021. Other shows include: The Man with Two Shadows, Circle Art Gallery online, 2020; Yawning for Power, Tilleard Projects, 2019; The Stateless, Circle Art Gallery, 2018; Freedom, Flight, Refuge, Circle Art Gallery, 2017; Art Transposition Nairobi-Kampala-Hamburg, LKB Gallery, Hamburg; Pop-Up Africa, GAFRA, London, 2017; Out of the Slum, Essen, 2012.Mwangi has participated in residency programs in Kenya, Germany and Italy.

Austine Adika (Kenyan, b. 1986)

Lives and works in Nairobi

Austin Adika creates intriguing and strange alien-like sculptures. Combining unlikely materials and colours and surprising spatial arrangements, his composite forms relate to everyday life whilst also reaching beyond themselves.

Adika's practice moves between material and medium in response to the times and spaces that he inhabits. Using carving, casting, welding and assemblage, elements of traditional sculptural methods combine with aspects of his training as a woodworker, metal smith and furniture maker.

Austine Adika was born in 1986 in Kisumu Kenya into a large family with sixteen siblings.Adika studied Political Science and Literature at the University of Nairobi and on a DAAD scholarship attended an exchange program at Dresden Technical University in Hamburg, Germany.

Before pursuing a career in the visual arts, Adika worked in product design for 10 years

Adika’s work was featured in the group exhibition Various Small Fires, Circle Art Gallery, 2021, and Antifragile in 2023, a year in which he also participated in the Kamene Residency founded by artist, Kaloki Nyamai. In 2024 he had his first solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery.