REVIEW: Christina Kimeze, “Long Loops,” at Hauser & Wirth

Christina Kimeze, bloom how you must (I), installation view. Image courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

REVIEW
Long Loops
Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood
8980 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
June 28, 2025 – October 4, 2025

By Ryan Rothman

Cloaked in a black suit, dwarfed by richly colored paintings taller than herself, Christina Kimeze wasn’t the eccentric visionary I imagined behind Long Loops. This contrast defines her practice, a quiet generosity and small sparks of inspiration blooming into expansiveness. At the opening of her show at Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, it became clear that Kimeze’s work focuses less on fixed conclusions and more on the movement of color, memory, and community inviting viewers to find personal connection within her world. 

Long Loops, Kimeze’s third solo exhibition and first in the U.S., features 12 large-scale paintings dissecting the “in-between spaces” bridging internal and community experiences. A London native, she received her undergraduate degree in biological sciences from the University of Oxford and pursued a career in science before attending the Royal Drawing School. Her experience as an older, non-traditional student in the prestigious Postgraduate Drawing Year program guided Kimeze’s transition into a full-time practice, as well as her awareness of the often-esoteric language of art spaces. Highlighting generosity at the center of her practice – allowing viewers to understand both the process and intention behind a work and interpret it for themselves – she opened the show on June 28 in conversation with curator and education Sandra Jackson-Dumont. 

Walking viewers through several works, they began with “Those Eight Wheels.” The title, borrowed from January Gill O’Neil’s poem “Night at the Roller Palace,” presents roller skating as one of several “anchors” Kimeze employs to examine the human condition. She explores roller rinks as spaces of freedom and community, a crowded public environment juxtaposing a solo activity and the unique experiences of each skater. Long Loops itself references the poem “The Life of the Otter, Tucson Desert Museum” by Thom Gunn and his description of an otter skating loops underwater. 

Kimeze noted poetry as a “way into the work,” with “bloom how you must” I and II adopting the final line in Lucille Clifton’s “mulberry fields.” These initial inspirations make way for what Kimeze calls “freestyling” with chalk, oil pastels, and paint on suede matboard panels. Not only an artist but a scientist, she improvises and experiments with the interaction between mediums, letting the work be “led by chance.” This instills a sense of fluid, rounded motion in each work, particularly “Those eight wheels.”

Christina Kimeze, Those eight wheels, installation view. Image courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Fluidity and the dynamism of skating resurface in the form of spiral staircases, arches, and bubble-like circles throughout the series. Foliage, specifically matoke leaves from her family’s native Uganda, alludes to the legacy of colonialism while depicting “imagined landscapes” free from that dark history. As with skating, Kimeze roots her definition of freedom in joy, in the feeling of floating above ground, rather than escape. 

In the spirit of generosity towards interpretation, I first noticed a sense of nostalgia and the complex inner narrative of childhood in Long Loops. Rich, dense bursts of color evoke pastel sidewalk chalk rubbed into concrete. Kimeze’s abstract figures and continuous narrative across pieces, as well as the vast gallery itself, mimic the vivid dreams and eerie feeling of smallness one experiences as a child.

Christina Kimeze, Long Loops, installation view. Image courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Balancing scientific and artistic methods, Kimeze presents a meditation on navigating freedom, community, and joy. Her generosity leaves viewers with the sense that, like skating in circles, her work prompts us not to arrive somewhere but enjoy moving through the loops themselves.

Like what you’re reading? Consider donating a few dollars to our writer’s fund and help us keep publishing every Monday.