For Focus on 2025, the series of in-depth studies dedicated to site-specific projects at the gallery in Milan, Vistamare is pleased to present Slow, steady, stillness by Nairobi based artist Agnes Waruguru.

Waruguru’s artistic practice spans across different media – textile, drawing, ceramics, needlework, natural pigment making and installation – through ideas of geographical belonging, time, and transience. Painting processes are combined with acts of making that she has learned and inherited from the women in her life. Beadwork, sewing and knitting are all incorporated in Agnes’ work, placing her personal identity in her practice and connecting it to women’s labour traditions. Waruguru explores the material of objects and their capacity to act as markers of identity and carriers of personal histories, to develop new sceneries which can often be memory or emotion landscapes. By avoiding the more typical approach to painting on primed, stretched canvas, the artist works predominantly on cotton, using dyeing, pouring and spraying, alongside brushwork as her means of applying paint. Water, a symbol of cleansing or rebirth in many cultures, is the main medium in most of the works. It is used as a primer to receive pigments, acrylic paints, inks and watercolors, applied in successive layers, either diluted or concentrated. “I started to make drawings that I would hang in the rain to see how I could collaborate with rain and trace the passageways of rain. In the past I have washed textile works in the ocean which led to an ongoing practice of cleansing my textile works with salt water as a beginning point of making a painting”.

The exhibition takes place in the two side rooms of the gallery and includes a series of new works together with a large-scale textile work realized during her residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. When combined together, as in the installation conceived for the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2024, the works create an immersive and contemplative space, inhabited by bright, expansive, atmospheric and almost dreamlike presences. “When making these works I always feel like more could happen. It’s like holding your breath. The work could surprise you. Not all the space is taken up so there is enough room to feel things moving, for the work to continue extending itself. I want to create a feeling of being suspended, of being in the middle of something”. The installation embraces the viewer, activating a sense of stillness, a space for listening and waiting. The viewers are invited to wander into Waruguru’s imagination and weave their own narratives.

Agnes Waruguru (1994, Nairobi) received a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA. She has participated in residencies in Kenya, at the Saba Artists Residency in Lamu, Artspace in Sydney, Australia and in 2023 completed a two year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Waruguru participated in the inaugural edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale, South Africa in 2020 and had her first solo show Small things to consider at Circle Art Gallery later that same year. In 2022 she was nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prize and in 2024 for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. Recent exhibitions and Biennale invitations include: Echoes of our stories at Quinta do Quetzal, 2023; 22nd Biennial Sesc–Videobrasil in Sao Paulo, 2023; Foreigners everywhere, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2024. Most recently, Waruguru was featured in The Artsy Vanguard. Young Artists to Watch list; an annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today.