More than 25 paintings and drawings by leading artists from East Africa are being shown at a prestigious arts fair in London.

The works, by seven artists, are being exhibited at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House, in the heart of the capital.

The name 1:54 refers to the one continent of Africa and its 54 countries.

Following similar shows in New York, Dubai and Cape Town, coupled with recent auctions in London and Paris devoted to African art, the London fair confirms the increasing importance of art from this region on the international scene.

Of the seven artists, five are Kenyan, one an expatriate Kenyan who was brought up in London, and one is an Ethiopian.

They are Paul Onditi, Peterson Kamwathi, Beatrice Wanjiku, Gor Soudan, the photographer James Muriuki, the expat sculptor and performance artist Arlene Wandera, and Ethiopian Merikokeb Berhanu.

All are represented outside Kenya by Lavinia Calza and her agency ARTLabAfrica, which has taken Stand G2 in the building’s West Wing to display the works from October 15 to 18.

Prominent among them are six mixed media paintings by Onditi that feature his iconic Everyman called Smokey, standing against a matrix of trees, snippets of digital imagery, barcodes and other symbols of consumerism and the resultant environmental degradation.

This destruction is also reflected in his patches of violent colours — orange, cobalt and viridian among them — that echo the fierce hues of minerals and metals that bleed into our polluted lakes and rivers.

They speak too, through Smokey, of man’s isolation within increasingly industrial surroundings.

This may not be the image of East Africa we like to portray abroad — the Big Five, leaping Maasais, and sundowners as sparks fly from crackling bonfires — but it is becoming, and ever more so, a new reality.

Kamwathi is represented by mixed media drawings from the Positions series that sold strongly in New York earlier this year.

In these, the artist highlights the roughly similar positions for prayer of Christians and Muslims and offers that as evidence of the potential for the followers of each of these faiths to find unity instead of division.

Nothing if not topical, Kamwathi is also showing preliminary drawings from his latest cluster of works, triggered by the mass movement of people from the Middle East conflict zones to Europe — the current refugee and migrant crisis.

Then there are Wanjiku’s acrylic paintings from her Straitjackets series; contorted and constrained figures that struggle against the boundaries of existence.

Soudan is showing colour blot and pen line drawings from his Join the Dots exploration of the act of artistic creation.

Berhanu’s luminous dreamscapes can be seen much nearer home, at the Red Hill gallery off Limuru Road to the west of Nairobi, until November 1.

There, some 13 of her canvases defy the Ethiopian tradition of overt figurative paintings born of long isolation and a national introspection.

Beautifully painted and containing figurative references in unexpected places, like seeing faces in the flames, some of her work has a hypnotic quality that holds the eye.

Huts of iron sheeting and eerie silhouettes of town dwellers meld with a lost rural idyll of trees and roots as she highlights, as does Onditi, the relentless march of urbanisation.

Berhanu’s poignant totems work against the counterpoint of calming fields of colour, although she seems to be having a love affair with scarlet, not the most restful of hues.

These paintings were presented at Red Hill through Calza and ARTLabAfrica, so we should not be surprised to find more of the same at Somerset House.

What is surprising, however — downright shocking in fact — is that our national institutions seem not to have woken up to the fact that art from this area is in such high demand abroad.

Art as an asset to the country; a growth line for export and a way to win friends and influence people. Indeed.
Pause for a sharp intake of breath.

Then pause again to ask why, then, art is no longer taught as an examinable subject in Kenyan schools.

And just one more pause while we ponder two further points: First, why the country’s national art pavilion in Venice is stuffed as full of Chinese paintings as a bowl full of poodles with noodles; and second, why the National Museums of Kenya occasionally admits any old rubbish into its hallowed halls, instead of having a demanding selection process that ensures it is a privilege to show there, and that the art it exhibits adds lustre to our lives and brings credit to its creators, curators and country alike.

I revisited the current exhibition of Sudanese paintings at the NMK on Museum Hill, Nairobi, and concluded reluctantly that, fascinating as Nubian symbolism undoubtedly is, and vibrant as the colours may well be, that had this show been half the size it would have been twice as good.

There needs to be a new tautness about the place that excises flab and ensures only the very best will do.

And if that means shutting down some of the cavernous halls and focusing on more intimate, less daunting spaces, let it be so.

For Kenya now is on show to the world — and if we cannot get it right at home, then where should our international excellence begin?

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, an arts consultancy based in Nairobi.