Richard Kimathi Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1937 -

Richard Kimathi was born in 1971 in Nyeri, Kenya. He received a diploma from the Nairobi Creative Art Centre with a major in Graphic Art. After graduation, he took up Fine Art as a career.

In 2000, Richard received a letter from the New York selection committee appointed to choose the work for a limited-edition postage stamp for the United Nations: ‘You, along with Vermeer and Matisse, have been chosen …’. This defining moment for Kenyan artists and for Kimathi in particular added still more force to the rising tide of international recognition of the extraordinary talent that is blossoming in the contemporary art of Kenya.

Richard is always exploring, experimenting, searching for a better expression. He has grown from these early years into an artist of considerable technical ability: confident in line, composition and colour; profound in expression. His work is seldom about himself, it is about us: humanity and how we are; unaffected by bling and hype and other aggrandisements evident in much of the contemporary art of our mass mediated world.

A sense of suffering: dignified, heroic even; without self-pity and borne as if merely the price of living; portrayed with an empathy and a compassion elegant in its simplicity and in its honesty, it permeates much of his work.