Richard Atugonza

Currently, Richard Atugonza focuses on creating portraits of individuals from his life, sculpting them using materials like sawdust, dried grass, and charcoal.

Biography of Richard Atugonza

Richard Atugonza was born in Fort Portal, Uganda, in 1994. From 2015 to 2018, he studied at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University, graduating with a BA in Industrial and Fine Arts.

He served as an apprentice in lost-wax casting and held the position of technical officer in a furniture workshop. However, in 2020, he decided to leave his role and transition to a full-time artist, joining the Silhouette Projects Residency Program.

Atugonza has exhibited his works in numerous group exhibitions, including "Africa Supernova" at Kunsthal KAdE in The Netherlands (2023), "Eastern Voices: Contemporary Art from East Africa" at Addis Fine Art in London (2023), "Where the Wild Things Are" at Afriart Gallery in Kampala (2022), "(Im)perfections" at Afriart Gallery in Kampala (2020), among others.

The artist has also participated in international art fairs, including Art Paris (2023), Miami Beach (2022), 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London (2022), Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2019), and many more.

Richard Atugonza's Art Style

Richard Atugonza employs the reverse technique to capture proportion, body movement, and posture. This involves dressing his models with bandages to obtain the negative, and then he manipulates clay in an 'editing' process to capture the figure's expression, ultimately leading to the creation of a cast.

The artist views his practice as a continuation of a recycling process. Initially, he started utilizing plastic litter discovered on the university premises, not to clean the campus but out of the necessity for affordable materials as a student. This expanded to sourcing plastic from his neighbors and acquiring it from the recycling depot. To enhance the durability of his sculptures and offer diverse visual and tactile experiences, he also experimented with other waste materials like sawdust, charcoal residue, and dried grass.