Mativo is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the emotional and material infrastructures of urban life. Working in Nairobi, his practice navigates the intersection of memory, identity, and spatial politics, rendering the city as a body marked by historical sediments, social negotiation, and the dynamic flows of human life.
Using local garbage bags, Canvas, embedding layers of newspapers, acrylic and oil paints, collage, other experimental mediums and installation, his work engages a tactile vocabulary of erasure, survival, and inheritance. His materials are transformed into dense cartographies of collective memory where surfaces behave like skin, and layers hold the weight of what cities remember but cannot say. He treats materials as active carriers of memory through layering, archival embedding, destructive and restoration processes, and other experimental processes.
Recent projects such as Fault Lines and The Architecture of Memory, position the city as both site and subject. In Fault Lines, Nairobi’s cultural fault zones are mapped through work on local polyethylene garbage bags, a material that is omnipresent across Nairobi and represents the interconnected yet divided realities of urban life. These bags are reimagined as socio-political membranes to bring out the tension between integration and exclusion. The Architecture of Memory maps the parallels between city and body. Like the human body, Nairobi records memory in layers. Nine works created between 2024 and 2025 channel this visceral cartography and carry the city’s psychic infrastructure: survival, displacement, improvisation, inheritance.
Mativo draws from traditions of conceptual painting, post-architectural figuration, and expanded material practice, his work favors embodied memory and proposes an alternative archive. He lives and works in Nairobi, where his evolving practice continues to investigate how cities feel, how they forget, and how they remember through matter.
Mativo is a graduate of creative Entrepreneurship by the Godown Arts Centre with a background in Architecture from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and also completed the networked course CopyrightX that explores the current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed offered by Harvard Law School courtesy of the GoDown Arts Centre.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
- 2023 “MIRROR MIRROR -The Portraits of being Alive,” Alliance Francaise, Nairobi, Kenya.
- 2023 “BURIED BUTTERFLIES,” Montague Contemporary, New York NY USA.
- 2024 “OPEN YOUR EYE,” Tribal Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.
- 2025 “THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY,” One Off Contemporary Art Gallery
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
- 2021 “The Yellow Series” Noir Gallery, Nairobi Kenya.
- 2023 “African Abstraction II” Montague Contemporary, New York NY USA.
- 2023 “ArtAffair 23” One Off Contemporary Gallery, Nairobi Kenya.
- 2023 “Behind This Face 2 – Echoes of the Past.” Gravitart Gallery, Nairobi Kenya
- 2024 “A Tapestry of Contemporary African Art.” Patchogue Arts Council • Museum of Contemporary Art, Long Island in collaboration with Montague Contemporary
- 2025 “Group Show” Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi Kenya.
SELECTED COMMISSIONS
- 2022 “The Tree” – 150cm x 180cm, Commonwealth Secretariat Talent and Cocktail event under the patronage of the Rt Hon Patricia Scotland KC, Commonwealth Secretary General in celebration of Black History Month on the 28th of October 2022.
