Mbugua Kimani is an award-winning Kenyan British artist whose practice spans woodcut, relief printmaking, and painting. In 2025, he was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) in recognition of his artistic achievement, originality, and commitment to the printmaking medium.
Kimani holds a Master of Science in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the University of London. His academic background informs a body of work that engages with questions of identity, belonging, social structures, environmental sustainability, and cultural representation.
His work has been exhibited internationally in Kenya, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Spain and the United States.
Mbugua Kimani’s practice spans painting, mixed media and printmaking. Lately focused on woodcuts, Kimani’s compositions are pressed by hand; the delicacy of his application sits in electrifying contrast with the richness of his colours, and the profundity of his subject matter.
Belying their medium, recurring motifs (fish, faces) seem almost to emerge from the paper rather than sitting upon it; drawing on themes of social justice, environmental degradation, and the inequality that so often underpins both, Kimani’s prints translate complex topics into deceptively simple images. Nuance is woven into each work, as much a part of its architecture as the figures and patterns that populate it.
His series Sex for Fish, for instance, addresses the relationships between local women and some fishermen in Western Kenya, wherein sex is exchanged for the day’s catch. Faces, at once beguiling and beseeching, flecked with scales or composed of fins and tails, meet the viewer’s gaze – leaving them to wonder whether Kimani is depicting the women buying fish, the men selling it, or the factors that give rise to the economy in the first place.
As ever, the most powerful interpretation is a layered one: whether his audience reads the countenances as belonging to the women or the men, they are implicitly figured as the other party, thereby plunged into an unsavoury transaction that might otherwise feel conveniently remote. Yet, the faces’ deliberate androgyny resists anything so straightforward, instead presenting buyer and seller as fundamentally inextricable. That flourish is exemplary of Kimani’s work, retaining fluidity without ever feeling distant; an immediacy that extends to the series’ financial impact, with the artist donating part of its proceeds to relevant charities.
Kimani’s Fractured Earth series is similarly purposeful, encompassing themes of climate disaster and people’s impact on the natural world. Focusing on humans’ symbiotic relationship with their environment, Kimani’s knowing surrealism – animal-human hybrids, blue mountains ruptured by bolts from the orange sky – both intensifies and abstracts his underlying message. Place, people, creatures: we are all part of the system we inhabit, just as capable of nurture as we are of destruction. Whichever we choose, we’ll be its ultimate recipients.
Pulsing through Kimani’s practice is his interest in identity: that of others, and his own. Fashioned from external forces and internal currents, it is the counterintuitive ambiguity of his figures that allows the artist to insinuate himself into every tableau; ditto his specific subject; ditto his viewer. Here I am; here you are; here we are.
As such, each composition performs that most quotidian of magic tricks, wherein the most exacting details deliver universalising depictions of us all.