Ed Mirza - Artists to Follow 2
Keeping a Tab on Those Artists Today Pushing the Boundaries, and Sure to Excel by Merit in the Auction Houses
Michael Armitage
In Michael Armitage’s work what may be seen is a great emotional charge in the figures, wherein their personal narrative is set in relief often against significant socio political back drops. These socio political moments are in themselves often set in the context of traditional and metaphysical symbolism and narrative.
​
These may be seen in general as history paintings, with a general epic focus.
The promised land has great deal of drama, movement, and tension. There is bathos, irony, tragedy, and struggle. The paintings sublimate this struggle, and are highly sympathetic, potentially unifying subject and viewer, in acknowledging the hardship and tension. There is an overriding sense of hope, in that poetry is used in the sublimation which gives over an idea that potentially people may unite in art and common values.
There are biblical references - ie revelation and the truumpets, and a sense of human pride in relief against the trials of the situation, these paintings speak about the nobility of the human spirit, against these odds. There is concentration of angst in the paintings, in which real life scenarios are whirled up with the paint.