Michael Armitage tells urgent stories in art

Invited three years ago to create a body of work for the Kunsthalle in Basel, where a seminal early Picasso show was put on in 1914, Michael Armitage quickly decided to fill one of its galleries with paintings of people with their eyes shut. They are variously daydreaming, fast asleep or comatose after sniffing glue. “It was just a very simple idea,” he explains. “It ended up being somewhere between death and life and something imagined.”

The title of his newly opened show, “You, Who Are Still Alive”, came to him as lockdown ended; and, indeed, only one of his subjects is no longer living. It is the first picture you see, and also the smallest, depicting the head of Koitalel Arap Samoei, a hero of the Kenyan resistance against British colonialists who began to build a railway across his tribal lands. In 1905 Koitalel was invited to a discussion with the authorities, only to be shot and decapitated by a notorious colonel called Richard Meinertzhagen. Koitalel’s bloodied head was dispatched to London and has never been returned. In the background of Mr Armitage’s painting a man has taken off his shoes as he bathes in the river, as if washing away his dirty work.