Kathryn Armitage (b. 1994, North Yorkshire, UK) is a figurative painter based in London. She completed a BA in Painting at Camberwell College of Art in 2016 and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024.

Using Dutch and Italian Old Masters as a point of departure, Armitage creates playful reimaginings through a collage-like process, blending historical imagery and her own figure with references to theatre, fiction and contemporary fashion. 

Her large scale canvases operate less as images and more as stages; spaces to rehearse, construct and project the self. Costume is utilised heavily as both a compositional anchor and a tool for transformation, adding to the sense that Armitage’s figures resist conventional notions of femininity. Unlike historical representations of the female body within painting, these figures are central to the narrative, assuming positions of agency and control and challenging the power dynamics traditionally embedded within the genre.

This concept of staging within the work also extends to Armitage’s approach to materiality. Thin washes of pigmented colour and loose mark-making are balanced with more heavily-worked passages of paint, oil stick and pastel. In places, bare linen and initial sketching - the seams of the work’s production-  are left visible. This intentionality reinforces the idea that these paintings function not as portraits but as fictional fragments - rehearsals for becoming.

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