Caroline Menezes interviews painter Kimathi Donkor whose works were recently on view in the exhibition Queens of the Undead, at Iniva, London.

Donkor comments: "I respect the viewer who goes to the gallery and wants to experience something that is uplifting or disturbing, that engages them intellectually. I am not just trying to put them into a dreamlike reverie. If you look at my paintings, they have got a very complex psychological and even spiritual element. I don’t think of them as being easy to read, they are difficult images, in a sort of surrealism sense… you can have an engagement with history; it is a necessary and valuable contribution to art, and vice-versa." He continues: "Part of it is just purely the joy of being able to have an overwhelming colour experience and to just abandon the constraints of naturalism. Then, it is about giving the viewer the opportunity to seriously question what is being presented. There are all these disruptions about place and time, there is a constant sort of jumping in the work, between today and yesterday, between here and there, there is this disorientating sense and I find it hard to not do it."