Richard Atugonza graduated from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art, Makerere University, Kampala, in 2019 with a major in sculpture and minors in photography and communication design. He previously worked as an apprentice in lost-wax casting and as a technical officer in a furniture workshop, which he left in 2020 to pursue an art residency with Silhouette Projects in Kampala. Atugonza’s current body of work from the series, Imperfection Perfections, encompasses a selection of portraits depicting people in his life through a sculpting process that uses ubiquitous materials such as plastic bottles and charcoal found in his immediate environment to capture proportion, body movement and posture using the reverse technique. In this making process, the subject matter and materiality fuse people and the environment in ways that appear brittle but become durable through the transformation of the plastic through combustion.

His work has been exhibited at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (2020), Abu Dhabi Art (2020), and two exhibitions (im)perfections and Surfaces, Afriart Gallery, Kampala (both 2019).