ADRIAN POPS UP IN KITISURU

BY Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted 26, 2023)

Talking about Pop-Up art exhibitions, there are very many that quietly take place around Nairobi curated by individuals who admire a particular artist and want to share his or her art with friends and family and others who may share their love for that creative. Most of these events take place without fanfare or news media. Meanwhile, the artist is usually grateful for the exposure as was Adrian Nduma last Friday when one of his collectors, George Owuor, opened his home and spacious garden to more than 30 of his dazzling paintings. Adrian does a thing with colors that is unique to his palette. He creates a luminosity with color that seems to emanate from within the canvas. Not all his paintings have that effect. At the Owuor home, there were a few create in stormy greys and black, suggesting storms about to invade. But then there’s another work in which a storm is brewing in the distance and one can see a delude of rain has already begun pouring down. But in the foreground of the same piece, that subtle sense of solarized color is still there, enduring up until the sun is overcome with rain-filled clouds.

Much of Adrian’s technique is drawn from both the impressionist and the realist schools although he also had portraits and abstract work among his 30 plus works on display in George’s garden as well as in his living room and foyer. His landscapes are among my favorites, which are often panoramic, reflecting Kenya’s true natural beauty, a beauty that needs to be protected from all the illegal loggers and miners and crooks who would rob the country of its one big asset, nature in all her diversity of color and flora and fauna. Adrian himself has a fascinating story. He actually graduated from kenyatta university in painting and graphic design but quickly went first into teaching, then advertising, then banking where he supervised other bankers first at ILRI, then at the KCB branch inside USAID, and finally at the US Embassy. He was with the bank for five years, when he was struck with the realization that he had to be true to himself. “There came a moment when I realized I had a higher calling,” he told BDLife just before his Pop-Up exhibition opened in Kitisuru.

So all that banking and advertising was cast aside when he made his radical move in 2004 to his own studio and chose to become a professional painter full-time. That was the same year Adrian established his own Bonzo Art Gallery on Ngong Road, where he displayed his own art as well as the young students whom he mentored, like Coster Ojwang and others. Unfortunately, he had to close Bonzo down when COVID came to Kenya. But COVID didn’t shut down all the commission requests made on Adrian which he has had to complete for clients coming from all over the world. When asked about where he has exhibited in and outside the country, he says he doesn’t exhibit in other art galleries since he has had his own. But he has participated in numerous pop-ups like the one that George created for him last weekend. Otherwise, he says his outreach is sweeping. “My art is everywhere,” he admits. “It’s in the US, UK and in countries all over Europe, in Australia, and Japan.” He adds. As for last Friday’s event, George has large high walls which accommodated Adrian’s giant landscapes, seascapes, and his wonderful chameleon, a work which reveals Adrian’s uncanny means of conveying the creature’s keen intelligence.

His marvelous sense of perspective gives a realism to a work like ‘The Migration’ which gives us both a foreground filled with wildlife and a background where the skies are threatening heavy rains are coming and which are already pouring fast in the distance. But he also gives an impressionistic, almost abstracted image of his wildlife which he barely outlines. He only paints them as curved colors so that you know what they’re meant to suggest. And as to why George handed over his house and garden to Adrian to present his latest works, he says he had been waiting for this time as he’s been an ardent of the artist’s work ever since he first saw it several years ago. “i knew practically nothing about art til I saw my first painting by Adrian,” George told BDLife. “Ever since then I’ve loved his paintings and wanted to have a show like this in my home. I’m delighted its finally happening.”