Evans Mbugua: Untold Stories: Circle Art Gallery Two
Evans Mbugua (Kenyan b. 1979) lives and works in Paris
He is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Pau in 2005, where he trained in graphic design and began his professional career in Toulouse as an art director in visual communication. In 2012, he relocated to Paris and committed himself fully to his artistic practice. His first gallery exhibitions took place in 2015, followed by his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2016, and then in London in 2017. Since then, his work has gained international recognition and has been presented in numerous gallery exhibitions and art fairs across Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. His paintings and sculptures were shown at the 19th Asian Art Biennale of Bangladesh (2022), the 59th Venice Art Biennale (2022) at AKKA Project gallery, and the 14th Dakar Biennale (2022) at Galerie Arte.
Evans Mbugua, (Kenyan b. 1979) lives and works in Paris
Untold Stories, 21 Jan – 25 Feb 2026Untold Stories is part of the ongoing research Evans Mbugua has conducted for more than a decade around questions of identity and memory, through portraits of people drawn from his everyday environment. This approach found resonance in the series Back to the Future (2018–2024), dedicated to his niece and two nephews, in which their childhood and adolescence mirrored the artist’s own memories of youth. That series nonetheless revealed the existence of silent zones within the family history, particularly those tied to his parents’ childhood.
It was then Mbugua thus became aware of the scarcity of material available to him from this period. On his mother’s side, his questions initially remained unanswered. On his father’s side, the death of his father in 2011 rendered this silence even more irrevocable. Faced with these absences, the artist relied on the few transmitted accounts, fragmented memories, photographic albums, and visual remnants drawn from an incomplete memory.
Through regular and patient questioning, his mother’s memory was unlocked opened up. Events experienced during her childhood, long silenced or buried, emerged in the form of sensitive fragments. Mbugua paid keen attention to this gradually unfolding testimony, which revealed both trauma and the emergence of a new form of complicity. Moments once considered banal or insignificant, because they belonged to everyday life, took on new and layered meaning.
In 2024, at his mother’s initiative, Mbugua met a figure crucial to his research: a 104-year-old woman who had been a close friend to his paternal grandparents. She shared an intimate family history spanning the precolonial period to the nation’s independence in 1963. This encounter opened, for the artist and his family members present that day, a precious window into his father’s childhood.
Mbugua’s inquiry subsequently expanded and became more structured through the study of historical writings, texts, and videos on the period from colonization to independence, including the emergency. In seeking to reconstruct a family history, the artist became aware that part of the narrative was irreducibly absent, perhaps lost forever.
By extending individual memory into a transgenerational one, the exhibition Untold Stories unfolds as a chronological frieze, in which shared moments of life and scenes of everyday experience dialogue with the history of the country, and beyond.
The meeting of his parents in 1970 serves as the central axis of the exhibition, with each parent represented through a distinct body of work, developed using specific formal approaches.
On his maternal side, Mbugua engages with the tradition of reverse glass painting, reinterpreting it through the use ofusing PMMA. Drawing on family photo archives from 1970 onward, he traces the history of the young Republic of Kenya and its link to personal memory.
On his paternal side, Mbugua extends his research into stained glass, cutting his paintings on PMMA sheets and recomposing figures from the fragments.Thefragments. The complete absence of photogenic archives from his father’s early life renders 1970 the genesis of the young family’s narrative, extending until 1999, the year the artist left his country of birth to pursue his studies in France.
These reflections are part of a broader contemporary movement of collecting and restoring voices. While silence is often understood as a survival strategy for generations marked by trauma, Untold Stories questions the idea that silence is absolute. Evans Mbugua’s work thus opens a space for narratives long held back, allowing them to re-emerge within the artistic and memorial field.
Biography:
Evans Mbugua is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Pau in 2005, where he trained in graphic design and began his professional career in Toulouse as an art director in visual communication. In 2012, he relocated to Paris and committed himself fully to his artistic practice. His first gallery exhibitions took place in 2015, followed by his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2016, and then in London in 2017.
Since then, his work has gained international recognition and has been presented in numerous gallery exhibitions and art fairs across Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. His paintings and sculptures were shown at the 19th Asian Art Biennale of Bangladesh (2022), the 59th Venice Art Biennale (2022) at AKKA Project gallery, and the 14th Dakar Biennale (2022) at Galerie Arte.
