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Kaloki Nyamai

Biography

Kaloki Nyamai - Artists - James Cohan

Kenyan painter Kaloki Nyamai takes inspiration from quotidian life in Nairobi, the capital city where he was raised and is now based. Nyamai views his artistic practice as a continuation of his ancestral lineage of storytelling. He often draws upon his grandmother’s stories of the Kamba people, a Bantu ethnic group of eastern Kenya. Constructing complex visual and physical depth within each composition, the artist proposes a powerful alternative to the flatness of singular narratives of Kenyan history and identity presented as the definitive postcolonial account. He likens the formal act of stitching to symbolically unifying a wounded or fractured community.

 

A persistent sense of togetherness emanates throughout his oeuvre, both physically and figuratively. Nyamai often depicts his subjects in mid-action – dancing, embracing, swimming, interlocking hands, and eating. His paintings foreground abstracted figures in vivid shades of color; emerging from layers of acrylic paint, sisal rope, photo transfers, and burnt rubber yarn. The figures fade in and out of view, much like a memory, revealing themselves through layers of paper and paint. The photo-transfers, derived from newsprint and photographic images, capture pivotal and often violent moments in Kenyan history and other parts of Africa.

 

Kaloki Nyamai’s richly textured surfaces entangle us in the space between history and memory. The treatments of his paintings are varied–some works are framed while others canvases are suspended un-stretched. The fragmented state of these compositions situates the viewer in the present, offering up a collection of moments that must be pieced together slowly by the eye. Nyamai captures the struggle of translating recollection and lived experience into physical form. 

 

Kaloki Nyamai (b. 1985, Kitui, Kenya) pursued formal training at the BiFa Institute of Fine Arts in Nairobi, Kenya. He has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at international venues including; the Norval Foundation, South Africa, Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin, Germany, The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky, and Voelkinger Hutte, Germany, among others. Nyamai’s upcoming solo exhibition Tuukelile Vaa, opens on January 14 and will run through February 27, 2026 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

 

Nyamai has participated in several international biennials such as the Kenyan Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Italy, Kampala Art Biennale (2018), Uganda, Stellenbosch Triennale (2020), and South Africa, Dakar Biennale (2022), Senegal. He debuted Dining in Chaos, a monumental triptych at Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland in 2023. Nyamai was recently included in the 16th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (2025), Sharjah, UAE.

 

His work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL, SAFFCA (Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art), Brussels, Belgium, The Arthur Primas Collection, Fondation H, Madagascar; and UTA Artist Space. 

 

In 2023, Nyamai founded the Kamene Art Residency, a program designed to foster artistic growth and cross-cultural collaboration in the heart of Nairobi. 

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