The art gallery at Kitengela Glass.
A veritable treasure trove of Kitengelia, contemporary African art & sculpture.
Colour Untamed
Katie Simpson is a Kenyan painter whose work is an act of witness to the animals, landscapes, and fragile ecologies that shaped her from childhood. Born in Kenya and formed by an artistic environment surrounded by nature, the colours and textures of Africa have never left her. They are the ground from which everything else grows.
Her paintings are ethereal explorations of the earth’s fragility and wildlife’s vulnerability, attempts to catch fleeting moments before they vanish, subjects held briefly in abstracted, luminous space. There is urgency in that impulse. Kenya’s wild places are changing, and Simpson paints in response - not with polemic, but with something more tender and more lasting.
She brings to this work a rigorous foundation: three years at Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, learning to truly see - to trust the eye, read light, and find the essence of a living presence through colour and mark. That discipline, built for the human face, turns out to be equally suited to the animal one. She gives pigments freedom to roam the canvas, combining ancient technique with contemporary painterly instinct. The result is painting that feels both wild and deeply considered - rhinos and leopards, painted dogs and flowering plants rendered with meticulous grace, then suspended in soft, atmospheric colour fields that dissolve the boundary between portrait and landscape.
Colour Untamed is her first exhibition at Kitengela Glass — a fitting home for work that shares the same belief: that art and the living world are inseparable.
With the rest of the gallery offerings rooted in the early ‘Bushglass’ tradition, it now features rare works by visiting artists like Emil Kováč, Ondrej Novotny, Marek Bartko, Christian Maas, and Tums Yeshim, alongside collaborative creations and other sculptural results of Anselm’s workshops.
Expect the unexpected - each piece is a conversation.
A Curated Collection of Flat, Fire & Form
