Kivuthi Mbuno, 1947

Kivuthi Mbuno was born in Kenya in 1947. He is a recognized master of the international art scene, with works exhibited in major museums and private galleries across Europe — including the Saatchi Collection — and in the United States, notably at the Center for African Art in New York.

In his early years, Mbuno worked as a safari guide, traveling extensively through the interior of Kenya and Tanzania. These journeys brought him into close contact with wildlife and the natural world, forging a deep relationship that would profoundly shape his artistic vision. In 1976, his connection with the family of Baroness Karen Blixen (better known by her pen name, Isak Dinesen) led him to settle in Langata, where he devoted himself entirely to drawing.

His long treks inland and the traditional life of the Wakamba people — his own community — became the foundation of his imagery. Working with ink, colored pencils, and pastels, Mbuno combines animals, humans, traditional objects, and vast open spaces in a precise, meticulous drawing style. This visual vocabulary has remained remarkably consistent for decades.

In Mbuno’s world, the vast territories of Africa are not hostile but luminous and peaceful. He reveals the extraordinary within the everyday. Animals — gazelles, giraffes, hyenas, elephants, snakes, birds — play with their own morphological characteristics, each inhabiting its territory in harmony with the others. Humans, though sometimes disruptive, are rendered with a blend of elegance and humor, moving with the same ease as the animals they pursue. Their expressive faces reveal spiritual depth, wit, and joy.

The model in Mbuno’s imagination leans more toward the supernatural than the natural. His work is not a naïve ancestral vision but a deliberate re-creation of an Eden-like world. For Mbuno, beauty lies in the harmonious coexistence of people and nature — a state he describes as “being inside beauty.”

In 2013, Kivuthi Mbuno was selected to represent Kenya at the 55th Venice Biennale.

source: “Contemporary Art of Africa,” A. Magnin; “Contemporary African Art from the Jean Pigozzi Collection”