Kay Gasei is a British Zambian painter who works in East London. He was born in Lusaka in 1991 and moved to London shortly thereafter.

Brought up in Erith, Gasei has lived and worked in Plumstead, Thamesmead, Woolwich, Harrow, and Shooter’s Hill. Though Zambia does figure in his work, it is therefore London, and not Lusaka, that has been the sounding board for his practise. Gasei currently works out of a decommissioned munitions factory in East Ham.

Working from this studio, Gasei has produced nine new works for Console Rites. Primarily oil on canvas, the pictures employ symbols derived from history and myth that serve to examine the artist’s past. In so doing, these symbols are placed under pressure; the canines of a baboon or a galloping horseman, compelled to fight for significance on a canvas dense with competing iconography.

Amidst such a morass of information, the symbols mutate, their importance in decoding the artist’s past called into question. This the artist delights in- his past restored to the romantically potent and inaccessible place he knew it was all along.