Geoffrey Mukasa, 1954-2009
Biography

Geoffrey Ernest Katantazi Mukasa was born in 1954 in Mulago, Kampala, Uganda, into a prominent family connected to the Buganda royal palace; his father, a doctor, was killed during Idi Amin’s 1971 coup, a rupture that shaped his early life. He studied art briefly in Kenya before travelling to India, where he earned a Fine Arts degree from Lucknow University between 1978 and 1984.

On returning to Uganda in 1984 he worked as a graphic artist for the Ministry of Information before establishing himself as a full-time painter. His mature work — oils on large canvases, often extended into mixed-media collage — combined abstract and primitive elements in a palette dominated by blues, lavenders and violets, built around human figures and heads set in semi-abstract surroundings. Critics noted the wide, unsettled eyes recurring throughout his figures, and his subjects — market vendors, fruit, chickens, fish — carried a psychological and spiritual weight beyond their everyday origins.

Widely regarded as one of Uganda’s finest modern painters, Mukasa exhibited in Uganda and Kenya, including with Nairobi’s Red Hill Art Gallery, until his death in 2009.

source: The EastAfrican; Start Journal; Wandering Educators; Red Hill Art Gallery