Mwesiga paints the Big Apple neon red

Ian Mwesiga is holding his debut institutional solo art exhibition in the United States at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. The Ugandan painter is displaying in the so-called Big Apple 11 of his oil paintings created between 2021 and 2023. The works on display embrace the mystery, fantasy, and possibility of the unknown.

Mwesiga’s work explores amalgamations of his imagination and everyday surroundings; solitary figures posed against vibrant backdrops melt away and defy perspective. Influenced by surrealism, the artist creates architectural precision while bending scale and perspective.

His canvases begin with the figure—fictional characters formed from the artist’s imagination—around which he constructs surreal environments, pairing seemingly familiar landscapes with quietly bizarre atmospheres. This contrast is achieved through Mwesiga’s manipulation of the proportion and setting of quotidian objects.

His body of work

In Tales of the Moonlight Boy, a 2023 painting, a bare-chested man reclines on a crinkly, pink satin sheet draped over an ornate balustrade as a striking, orange bird perches atop a globe-sized passion fruit. In Lady in a Blue Dress at a Bus Stop, another 2023 painting, a woman in a brightly patterned blue dress and shoes waits in anticipation on a desolate sidewalk while a figure holding an umbrella dissolves into a grisaille fog.

Lying on a Bed of Mist, a 2021 painting, shows a young woman lying on grass and a fallen tree truck. Her left hand is stretching out to a glass with a pink drink. On her right is a bird patched on a branch of a tree. Mist is covering the tall trees.

Man and his shadow, from his 2023 collection, depicts a man dressed in a multicoloured swimwear while putting on a stocking in his left foot with his right hand. His left hand is resting on the wall, with his shadow reflected on a wall. The wall and pillar are meanwhile reflected in the swimming pool. Leaves also float on the water for good measure.

A woman with braids dressed in a pair of blue denim jeans shorts and brown blouse is depicted lying on a branch of a tree in Tales of the moonlight girl—another from the 2023 collection. Both her hands and legs are hanging in the air. The trees, moon, clouds, and the sky are in the background.

In Man With Apple Standing in A Pool, a 2023 painting, a man dressed in sky blue is looking sideways while in a swimming pool with an apple in his right hand. A ridge, blue sky and clouds are reflected in a window on a building. A Pepsi billboard is placed on top of the building.

Mwesiga’s other artworks are Man striding on a staircase from 2023; Swimmer and Man standing by the pool also from 2023; Basketball Player IV, a 2022 painting; and Dead End from the 2021 collection; among others.

Reading his works

Within the composition, Mwesiga’s figures appear as if they are situated at the intersection of a parallel dimension that, whether solitary or coupled, suggest isolation. His world consists of ephemeral reflections, refractions, and shadows; like symbols in a dream, imagery recurs throughout the eleven paintings in the exhibition.

In these sequences, order is expressed through tiles and bricks, and abstraction is realised through overgrowth and mist—the natural world brought into high contrast. Here, seemingly disparate elements—like falling leaves, partially-eaten apples, and black-headed gonolek birds— occupy a familiar universe where seasonal, temporal, and lunar cycles are suspended.

The 10-week-long exhibition entitled Beyond the Edge of the World that opened on February 23 will close on May 4, 2024.

A striking spectrum of blue unites the works in Beyond the Edge of the World, gracing glistening pools, abandoned stairwells, and Pepsi billboards with brilliant hues. Mwesiga welcomes the colour’s inherent dichotomies, capable of underscoring a sense of calm or melancholy. With blue, he melds the sky, land, and sea, creating a mirroring effect that connects unfathomably vast natural elements with the landscape in and around Kampala—interwoven with visions from his personal life, experiences, and travels.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Haruki Murakami’s 2002 book Kafka on the Shore. As the author describes and the artist depicts, “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And hovering about there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

A commissioned text by Dr Darla Migan, art critic, philosopher, and professor at The New School, New York, NY, accompanies Mwesiga’s exhibition.

Mwesiga unplugged

At a glance.

He has participated in residencies, including Asiko Art School in 2015 facilitated by Bisi Silva and CCA Lagos. He has exhibited his works in both local and international solo and group exhibitions. 

Mwesiga’s paintings reflect a perpetual obsession with defying perspectives.