Godwin Champs Namuyimba Ugandan, b. 1989

Born in Masaka, Uganda in 1989, Namuyimba earned his BFA from Kyambogo University in Kampala in 2017. He credits his formal training with offering a platform for his art, but notes that his professional discipline is largely self-taught. In 2019, Namuyimba had his first European solo exhibition at Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Stockholm; since then, he has exhibited around the world in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Brussels.

Godwin Champs Namuyimba has an astute sense of presence when extracting the fantastical from the mundane. His observation skills tell of the humanity that his subjects offer through insights and exposure into their most vulnerable, intimate or farcical moments. His subjects suggest that they have gone through some sort of change but it is either so discreet that we overlook the subtleties of that transformation while we are apprehensive to really learn what that change may mean to us.

Godwin Champs Namuyimba uses the human form to explore identity, race and individuality in the context of post colonial Africa. In his art there’s an important focus on Afrocentrism, a conception that inspire his works, by uprising and depicting the African figure in different moments of the everyday life. Afrocentrism is in contrast with Eurocentrism and expands into Afrofuturism, these conceptions grow and evolve into a desire for a better future in the African continent.

“I try to approach the subjects from a point of empathy” says Namuyimba. “I’m interested in what happens when the subject is transformed into the content [...] I’ve grown up in an era of digitalisation, you can look at a lot of images via internet, via books and stuff of that kind, so, the moments of feeding my mind inspire my art.”

It is inside the feeling of unease that is delivered through the channel of beauty where Namuyimba finds the unintentional poetry that forms the basis for his works. The eye of the artist wandering around in these paintings. Some of his perspectives are dizzyingly misplaced, but these ad hoc perspectives tell us more about the act of seeing, as if we were there ourselves on the inside of his paintings looking around, up and down, from side to side, in the presence of an unconventional dimension.