First Supper (2025) Malerei von Ngendo

First Supper returns to the familiar motif of a well-known image to suggest a different kind of beginning — one that does not seek to replace, but to expand the frame of perception.
Drawing loosely from a Kikuyu creation story, the work weaves together myth, personal memory, and material to reflect on the ways culture is continually in motion — shaped by what we inherit, what we encounter, and what we imagine.

Set in a liminal, celestial space where the earthly and the divine intersect, it resists static storytelling. Instead, it offers a living tableau—a dynamic family scene centered around women, with Agikuyu and Mumbi (Patriarch and matriarch), and their nine daughters presiding not as icons, but as vibrant, textured personalities. The baby tugging playfully at the tablecloth invites us to see the sacred through the lens of the everyday: full of humor, warmth, and movement. The scene illustrates a living rite of cultural inscription.

At the heart of the composition, the dinner table functions as a shared surface of cultural convergence—laden with foods both ancestral and global, where roast goat sits comfortably beside fast food. There is no hierarchy here, only a layered simultaneity where traditions, borrowed rituals, modern-day tastes and commercial goods (Corning Ware) coexist. Actual and painted materials—lace, Ankara, colonial-era hurricane lamps and Arabic lanterns—gesture to the plural, often contradictory ways culture is absorbed, inherited, or imagined. The supernatural elements, like oversized mushrooms and strange mounds and masquerade effigies , metaphorically speak to unseen roots and silent transmissions -connective ties. In embracing these multiplicities, First Supper offers a view of culture not as a fixed point, but as a vibrant, unfolding archive—one deeply personal, yet inextricably connected to the global and the unseen.

In this simultaneity of contradictions we find something approximating a view that is closer to home.

Verwandte Themen

PeopleCultureEthnicContemporaryAfrican