East African Artist Elias Mung’ora at Montague Contemporary

By JONATHAN GOODMAN May 30, 2024

The current show up at Montague Contemporary is by the gifted Kenyan artist Elias Mung’ora is titled “One of Many Ideas of Home.” The ten paintings on display are of interiors with people sitting on sofas and chairs. These works are startling in their originality, both in regard to the overall arrangement–the artist’s considered placement of furniture and people in each scenario–and also in the way each person is rendered, which includes both exacting detail and a bit of idiosyncrasy–enough to identify Mung’ora as an original. Although the artist works figuratively, he is not highly dependent on representation’s long history. The structure of his paintings, that is, the placement of furniture and persons, is very much his own.

Contemporary artists borrow all the time. Mung’ora, an artist from East Africa, uses traditional Western methods and visual tropes. Like most painters working today, he employs styles not belonging to his own history. This is, by now, an accepted methodology; there is nothing wrong in taking from traditions not one’s own. The complexities of such borrowing have been evident for more than a century; Picasso began modernism by borrowing from African masks and sculptures. Today, the phenomenon has been increasing; Mung’ora, whose technical skill is prodigious, invokes a point of view that is culturally broad. There is very little in his interiors that would strike a New Yorker as odd or out of place.

A PORTRAIT OF DAUDI, 2024, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas 39.5 x 39.5 in., 100 x 100 cm.
 

In a larger sense, Mung’ora is taken with the transitory nature of place–perhaps those depicted in his interiors will be found somewhere else soon. Always in his art, the ceiling or roof is not seen; there is the implication that the interiors are, on some level, makeshift sites open to change.

Mung’ora, now studying anthropology, is also interested in community, both its establishment and loss over time. While these concerns are hard to read in the paintings, they nonetheless exist as a veiled backdrop against which the furniture and people are found. Community, increasingly invisible in light of social pressures, can be understood as an ideal harmed by the excessive individualization of our lives.

As the title of the show, “One of Many Ideas of Home,” demonstrates, Mung’ora is working within a theme that is experienced by people everywhere. Perhaps his considerations have a shorter history within his background, but the comforts of home and the intimacies of people at ease connects with all of us: we all know what its like to rest on a sofa! But the human element in Mung’ora’s work, as important as it may be, is also an opportunity to paint rooms and their furnishings in innovatorary fashion.

ELIAS MUNG'ORA, Unplanned Move 2, 2024, Signed and Dated on Front, Mixed Media on Canvas, 71 x 71 in., 180 x 180 cm.

In the painting Wangi and Daudi (2024), a young woman and a man lounge across a couch with a small circular table before it. Other items are strewn on the floor, including a vase and a pair of sandals. There are also carpets lying in the space before the two men. The carpets, with their decorations, enhance the picture. They are a kind of painting in their own right. The carpets add domesticity to Mung’ora’s accomplished treatments of interior space. In the artist’s work, home is never an idea but a place demonstrative of feeling.

Mung’ora fine, moving set of paintings aligns easily with renderings of domestic scenes everywhere. This is true across cultures and time. The living room scenes cannot be read as specifically African; indeed, part of their charm stems from the paintings’ dialogue with similar interiors in other places. In the striking work titled A Portrait of Rhoda (2024), Mung’ora, shows us a single magisterial woman, physically commanding, whose multi-colored dress descends to the ground. A grand personage, she stand outside with benches behind her; in back of the benches, there is a painted wall. The figure possesses genuine gravitas.

In this body of work, Mung’ora effortlessly moves into a large, international community of painters. These painters are figurative artists interested in the difficulties of form and the representation of people–the goals of such artists are as old as art. But Mung’ora, in addition to participating in tradition, is wonderfully new. He is an African artist whose interests do not come from his culture’s past. Yet his skill with his medium and his subject is overt.

ELIAS MUNG'ORA, One of many ideas of home, 2024, Signed and Dated, Mixed Media on Canvas, 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 in., 100 x 100 cm.

One of the most striking paintings by Mung’ora is One of the Many Ideas of Home (2024). It also may his best. This interior is complicated with furniture: a large armchair in the foreground faces a sofa with pillows in the back. On the left wall a painting hangs above a low cabinet, while the wall facing us has an open design in steel in front of the open space behind it. The real interest of the work is the woman wearing a caftan sitting in a sofa to the viewer’s right. Her hair is done up in a bun, and she looks comfortable in the well-appointed room.

Because the woman sits in profile rather than facing us, we don’t have the chance to read her expression. But that may not matter as she settles back in the couch. Perhaps this picture offers us proof of comfort and pleasure. Here, as throughout the show, Mung’ora’s style matches his theme;, the idea of home as metaphor, as the site of ease and dreams.

ELIAS MUNG'ORA, Wanji and Daudi, 2024, Signed and Dated on Front, Mixed Media on Canvas, 47 x 47 in., 120 x 120 cm.

Mung’or is thoroughly accomplished at what he does–despite his youthful age of 32. He is very good at placing figures to that visual interest is enhanced. His recognition will likely become international; already a museum in Indiana is giving him a solo show. It looks like people are recognizing his accomplishments. The tropes he addresses easily resonate across cultures, making Mung’ora very much an artist for our time. WM