Biography
Elias Mung'ora is a Kenyan painter whose work maps the urban life of Nairobi — a city he was not born in, but came to understand by moving through it. Born in 1992 in Nyeri, in central Kenya, he moved to Nairobi initially to study real estate and property management before leaving to pursue art, honing his skills partly through tattooing and self-directed practice. Though painting is his primary medium, he works fluidly across drawing, photography, printmaking and woodcut, building richly layered canvases from transfers and assemblages based on his own street photography. Beneath their everyday scenes — a wedding, a portrait session, a quiet street — his paintings carry a sharper inquiry into the fragmentation of the city, the traces left by past lives in worn and repurposed spaces, and the colonial land histories that still shape who belongs where. A member of Nairobi's Brush Tu Artist Collective, he won the 2016 Manjano Art Prize and has been a finalist in the Barclays L'Atelier and EPI competitions; his work has shown in New York, Kampala, Rennes and Venice, and entered collections including the I&M Bank Collection, with a promised work at the MFA Boston. One of his paintings even appeared in season two of HBO's Insecure.
