Detail : Mayday, 2026
Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas 
90 x 100 cm 
​Kshs 280 000  
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​Thom Ogonga
Fragments 

Thom Ogonga (Born 1975, Nairobi - Kenya), is an artist whose practice engages with themes of memory, emotional interiority, and the shifting dynamics of personal relationships, often drawing from lived experiences as a site of inquiry.
Ogonga explores the expressive and temporal possibilities of material. His process is characterized by layering, revision, and the interplay between control and spontaneity, resulting in surfaces that register both immediacy and duration. Through fragmented compositions and partially resolved forms, his work resists fixed narratives, instead foregrounding ambiguity and emotional complexity.
His recent body of work investigates rupture - particularly the psychological and affective dimensions of separation, grief, and the ongoing process of self-redefinition. His paintings situate the personal within a broader visual language, inviting viewers to engage with states of vulnerability, absence, and transformation.
In Fragments, Ogonga presents a body of work that resists the expectation that painting must resolve what it depicts. Instead, these works remain deliberately unsettled, inhabiting the difficult terrain of separation, where meaning is neither fixed nor fully recoverable.
What emerges across the exhibition is not a narrative of separation or heartbreak in any singular sense, but a sustained engagement with rupture as a condition. He approaches this condition obliquely - through interruption, through erasure, through the refusal of compositional closure. Forms hesitate. Figures are partial and contingent, as though still negotiating their own coherence. The paintings do not reconstruct what has been lost; they attend to what persists in its wake.
Material becomes a critical site of this inquiry. Acrylic, with its speed and immediacy, records gesture at the level of impulse - marks that feel reactive, even provisional. Oil, by contrast, slows the work down, allowing for reworking, concealment, and the gradual accumulation of surface. These temporal distinctions are not merely technical; they register the oscillation between urgency and reflection that characterizes experiences of grief. The surfaces, consequently, read as palimpsests - holding traces of what has been altered, covered, or left unresolved.
There is, notably, no stable vantage point offered to the viewer. Spatial relationships shift; foreground and background collapse into one another. Absence is not framed as lack, but as an active structuring force - what is withheld or obscured exerts as much presence as what is rendered visible. In this way, Ogonga situates painting as a site where emotional and perceptual uncertainties can be sustained rather than resolved.
Importantly, Fragments does not align itself with narratives of recovery that culminate in wholeness. If there is movement here, it is subtle and uneven - an attunement to adaptation rather than repair. The works suggest that to live through rupture is not to return to a prior state, but to inhabit a reconfigured one, where fragmentation becomes a condition of ongoing formation.
What Ogonga ultimately offers is not resolution, but a language - one that allows the complexities of loss, memory, and becoming to remain visible, and, crucially, to remain open.
Copyright Thom Ogonga (2026)

 

The Squad, 2026
Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas 
100 x 100 cm 
​Kshs 280 000 
Mayday, 2026
Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas 
90 x 100 cm 
​Kshs 280 000 ​
Flying Solo, 2026
Mixed media on Canvas 
71 x 50 cm 
​Kshs 140 000 ​
 THOM OGONGA
DATE OF BIRTH: 30th December 1975
NATIONALITY: Kenyan

WORK EXPERIENCE
2017 – 2026: Editor/Creative Director – The Nairobi Contemporary Trust
2010 – 2026: Independent Curator

SELECTED CURATORIAL PROJECTS
2025: New Wave - One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi
2022: Prints – Limited Edition Iterations – One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi
2019: Critical Writing Workshop – 32 Degrees East, Kampala
2018: Cultural Journalism – BIEA, Nairobi
​2017: Proximity to Power – Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi
2016: Art Critic Forum – Goethe Institute, Nairobi
2016: Migrants & Refugees – Alliance Francaise/Goethe Institute, Nairobi
2011: Turbine Generation Schools Project – Gasworks Studios, UK


SELECTED RESIDENCIES
2010: On Independence & the Ambivalence of Promise - Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA)- Lagos
2004: East African Artists’ Residency - Godown Art Centre - Nairobi
2003: Fontys Akademie, Tilburg - Netherlands


SELECTED ARTIST WORKSHOPS ATTENDED
2010: Braziers Artists Workshop – Oxfordshire, UK
2007: Thupelo International Workshop - Cape Town, South Africa
2004-2011: Wasanii International Workshops - Kenya
2004: Partage International Artists’ Workshop - Flic en Flac, Mauritius
1999: Building Art Together - Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya


SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
2018 – 2025: Editor & Contributor, Nairobi Contemporary Magazine
2024: Confusing Sky – Book on Richard Kimathi by Almas Art Foundation
2024: Soul Art – Book By Matt Kayem
2018: Migrants & Refugees Exhibition Curatorial Text
2012: Book on Maasai Mbili By Contact Zones
2011: Wall Art In Kenya – Book By Arvind Vohora


AWARDS
2006: Elysee Treaty Juried Competition & Exhibition - Winner of the 2nd Place-Best of Paintings
Spiral Without Witness, 2026
Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas 
90 x 100 cm 
​Kshs 280 000