Ancient Soi, 1937-2022
Biography

Ancient Soi (also published as Ancent Soi) was born in 1937 in Machakos County, Kenya, in a farming family of Kamba background. He attended sales courses at a college in Nairobi before turning to art, and by the 1960s was among the first generation of contemporary Kenyan painters to build a professional career from their work.

In 1971 Soi won a continent-wide competition to design the official poster for the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, a rare distinction for an African artist at the time and one that brought his work international attention. Through the 1980s and 1990s he exhibited regularly with Nairobi’s Gallery Watatu, becoming, alongside artists such as Jak Katarikawe and Sane Wadu, one of the figures most closely associated with that gallery’s promotion of self-taught Kenyan painting.

His paintings — detailed, narrative scenes of rural ceremony, childhood memory and everyday village life — were shown during his lifetime in the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and Kenya. He died in March 2022 at the age of 85.

source: The EastAfrican; The Standard; askART; Gallery Watatu exhibition history