"For a time, I knew more about international events than local ones."
Joseph Bertiers (Joseph Mbatia, b. 1963, Nairobi, Kenya) is one of Kenya's most distinctive painters and visual storytellers. For over three decades he has produced satirical, densely populated paintings on plywood and metal, chronicling Kenyan society and world events with biting humour. A voracious reader of the local and international press, he transforms news into imagined scenes crowded with politicians, preachers, dreamers and charlatans, often embellished with hand-painted English text. Discovered in the 1980s by the American dealer Ernie Wolfe, who became his patron, Bertiers has exhibited from Los Angeles to Dakar. His works are held in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Williams College Museum of Art.
