Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu is a Brooklyn-based artist whose sculptures, works on paper, installations, and videos explore gender, race, and sexual identity using collage and assemblage strategies that create provocative juxtapositions of the female body.
Art Work
Her paintings and collages often feature writhing female forms, their skin an eruption of buboes, mutant appendices like gun shafts or machine gears sprouting from the sockets of joints, their bodies half human, half hyena. They offer a glimpse at the perversions of the body and the mind wrought by forces active in the oppression of women. Mutu commonly works on paper or Mylar polyester film. Manipulating ink and acrylic paint into pools of colour she carefully applies to her surfaces imagery sampled from disparate sources- Vogue, National Geographic, hunting, motorbike and porn magazines. The resulting works are a rebuke to the conventions of aesthetics and ethnography and eroticism that underpin such publications, offering instead an existence that is riotously free of biological determinism or psychological conditioning.
Wangechi Mutu’s work is the subject of the significant exhibition Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, which began at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina (2013) and has subsequently toured to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2013); the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2014); and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University, Illinois (2014).
The artist has previously had solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, touring to Orange County Museum, California (both 2013); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (2012); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, (2012); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2010); Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2009); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2008). Mutu’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC
Wangechi Mutu
(2014); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2013); Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom (2013); National Gallery of Canada, Ontario (2013); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2012); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Brooks Art Museum, Memphis (2012); MOCA, Los Angeles (2010); Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2010); Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2010); 10th Biennale d’art Contemporain de Lyon (2009); and The New Museum, New York (2008). The artist received the 2010 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award.
Awards
On 23 February 2010, Wangechi Mutu was honoured by Deutsche Bank as their first “Artist of the Year”. The prize included a solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.
In 2013, Mutu was awarded the BlackStar Film Festival Audience Award for Favorite Experimental Film in Philadelphia, PA and the Brooklyn Museum Artist of the Year, Brooklyn, NY.
Family, Wife and Children
Wangechi Mutu is Married and has two daughters.
Facebook and Twitter
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