The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Agnes Waruguru

This year has brought Waruguru’s work to a broad swathe of new audiences. She was included in a group show at Circle Art Gallery, which represents her work, and another at Rele. She also completed the prestigious Rijksakademie fellowship in Amsterdam in 2023. Most significantly, her work was selected for inclusion in “Foreigners Everywhere” at the Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa: eight floor-to-ceiling cotton sheets delicately adorned with acrylic ink and natural pigments. Across these shows, she has presented her unique painting language, capturing subtle observations in nature and recording the passing of time and the landscapes she experiences.

In a recent Zoom conversation from her home in Nairobi, the artist was warm, quietly confident, yet thoughtful in her responses. She talked about her experiences in the U.S. and the Netherlands, and how returning to Kenya and a deep appreciation for nature and the natural world informs her practice. “Nature is a big part of the work and will outlive us all,” she explained. “There’s so much knowledge and history.” Some areas of nature have become particularly important in her work: “Water is something I’ve been quite invested in, how much of a life source it is as part of the natural world,” she said. “I think of it as an archive of memory and how it can inform us about how we live.”

In her earlier works on paper and cotton from 2020, including Dreams of More, and More, and Yesterday and In Reality, Dreaming of Palms, Waruguru captures delicate outlines of flora and fauna, from the coastal island environment of Lamu Island, Kenya. There, the artist undertook the Saba Artist Residency, located on an idyllic palm plantation by the Indian Ocean, which was when she began to cleanse her textile works with salt water. “I was captivated by the transformative marks left by the salt water on the paintings,” she said. “This deliberate technique introduced an exciting element of unpredictability into my artistic process.”

Waruguru earned her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2017. Studying in the U.S., away from her native Kenya, in a predominantly white, male, and Western environment led Waruguru to question her identity as a queer Black African woman and her place within art histories. “When I arrived at SCAD, I had a sort of identity crisis as I was in both a white and a male-dominated teaching and painting environment, even though this was in Georgia,” said Waruguru. “I began to probe my place and voice within this context, so I began using these familiar ways of making art as a form of home-making and self-meditating through craft practices that reminded me of both my mother and home in Kenya.” Thousands of miles from where she grew up, she began to mine memories of home.

Waruguru is deliberate in her abstract painting process, yet she hesitates to be categorized formally as an abstract or minimal painter. “I don’t consider myself a minimalist, even though my work may seem subtle,” she said. “What truly fascinates me is the tranquility and gradual evolution of the process.”

Waruguru has used many different materials in her practice, and takes an experimental, almost scientific approach: “I find it intriguing to experiment with different materials to realize their potential. It’s about uncovering infinite possibilities through small adjustments and closely observing each stage of the transformation,” she said. This process can be collaborative and meaningful: “I don’t work alone; I engage with multiple pieces simultaneously,” she said, “turning the process into an active journey of creation, collection, gathering, and arrangement. My work is like a community of interconnected entities, coming together as a unified whole, inviting the audience to feel a sense of unity and community through my artworks.” This unusual use of materials drawn from everyday life is a way to turn the familiar, domestic environment into something new.

Most recently, her impressive installation at the Venice Biennale, titled Incomprehensible Weather in the Head (2024), brought this approach to the large white cotton sheets that form the canvas for the work. They are adorned with acrylic, paint, Indian ink, natural pigments, saffron, pastels, charcoal, and glass beads. These tiny glass spheres reflect light from the work, while pigments and spices like saffron create intense stains on the cotton. When viewed at a distance, the sheets look something like ancient scrolls, marked by time, encouraging closer inspection of these constellations of marks.

In the Venice show, Waruguru is the sole Kenyan participant in an exhibition focusing strongly on textiles. Her delicate and confident paintings demand attention alongside impressive works by artists incorporating Indigenous textile-making traditions.