Kimathi Mafafo is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges from embroidery and oil painting to installation. Mafafo obtained a National Diploma in Fine Arts from the College of Cape Town in 2007 and a National Diploma in Film and Video from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 2016. Born in the semi-arid Kimberley in the Northern Cape of South Africa, Mafafo questions historical stereotypes around gender inequality in Africa. She primarily focuses on celebrating the black female and depicting abstracted forms typically surrounded by verdant imagery, characterised by lush greenery and sensuous drapery that are far removed from the dusty mining town where she grew up. She has recently organized a group of Capetonian woman into an informal traditional embroidery society.
Rita Maikova (b. 1990, Ukraine) lives and works in Barcelona. She studied Fine Arts at the Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design, graduating in 2012. The artist weaves forms and symbols taken from her personal life that explore interlocking themes of love, change, and resilience. Maikova's characters are various and unique, embedded into the landscape that flows through and around them. They are the inventions of her imagination, but they are also visions of a world in harmony. For Maikova, the act of creation is a healing process which unlocks access to her imagination allowing her to make candid yet surreal compositions.
Three of her works are now part of the permanent collection exhibition at FAMM Museum, Mougins. Maikova’s work “Our Flying Dragon” (2023) is part of a body of work that explores “the duality of existence’ that not only Ukrainians and other nations living with conflict must negotiate on a day-to-day basis, but millions of other people whose worlds have been torn apart by personal, social or political circumstances.
In these works, the divide is drawn between the body (bones) and ribbons (the soul). In each painting we can locate both modes of existence – light and dark, despair and hope – but rather than setting up opposites, the compositions gesture towards a kind of resolution or as Maikova puts it ‘the party after the battle’, a time of healing and celebration.
May 15, 2026