Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu (b.1972, Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She was educated in Nairobi at Loreto Convent Msongari (1978-1989) and afterward studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales (I.B., 1991). Mutu moved to New York in the 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and then received an MFA from Yale University (2000).

She creates painted and collaged images of female figures, first painting outline images on PET film, then adding detail with photographic fragments of idealised women collected from print magazines. Drawings often begin small, are then enlarged and moved to a work table where inks and washes are applied. She uses a variety of materials including archival adhesive, ink, glitter, paint, soil and pearls.

She objects to the portrayal of black women as either tribal aborigines or hypersexualized pinups. By confounding these images, she creates a dialogue between them, allowing the viewer to reflect on both without replicating the objectification of either.

As art historian Angela Stief writes in her catalogue essay for Mutu's exhibition In Whose Image (Kunsthalle Wien, 2009):

The material divergence of Mutu’s work binds the beholder’s attention to the surface of the artwork, an effect that is amplified by the use of the unusual, film-like Mylar and by the conspicuous materiality of the individual components. The madeness of the work, its own artificiality, becomes particularly apparent in the collage and assemblage, although it integrates found objects such as photographs, i.e. immediate documents of the world. Subjective expression is manifested only marginally in the direct hands-on production and in the pastose application of ink, showing itself instead primarily in the collision of found materials and in the expressive contradiction of the individual parts, which generally display a immediate link to reality, documenting views and ideologies and letting them clash. Wangechi Mutu amplifies the significance of the components by integrating unusual materials into her collages, such as pearls, glitter and rabbit fur, the latter giving rise to associations of skin violently separated from the animal while at the same time communicating the allure of a sensuous softness. The typical accessoires adorning Mutu’s art are jewelry, high-heeled shoes, red lips, parts of machines and motorcycles – attractors and fetishes invented to create nonfunctionally based added value in the merchandise world of a society oriented toward luxury, consumerism and fun. These are objects that less satisfy needs than create them, and yet as fragments of desire they are a symbolic placeholder for the irrepressible residues of wishes and fantasies.

The identities described by Mutu never want to resemble a real individual. By accenting the masklike quality she creates beings beyond the individual, thus putting into question the possibility of the portrait as a mirror of the subjective per se. Instead she discusses processes of adaptation, aggregation and simulation of identity. In the end she describes a postmodern and postcolonial being that is completely absorbed into the fluctuation of signs, of cultures, regions and eras. Mutu’s figures are hybrids that are half human, half animal, half human, half machine, half human, half monster, on the one hand sickly and reminiscent of prosthesis wearers, and yet on the other hand beautiful and attractive, at once primitive and overcivilized, futuristic and archaic. “The essence of the ‘wonderful’ and of the ‘monstrous’ rests in transgressing the line of demarcation between species, in mixing the animal and the human. It is the excesses of fantasy that alter the qualities of the things to which God has given a name. It is the metamorphosis that allows one order or species to cross over into the other; to put it another way: the transmigration of souls.”

The figures generally feature grotesque distortions of form and skin texture, which critics read as commentary on a variety of feminist and racial issues ("of the history of women's representation, of cultural migration, global identity; of a litany of historical violence and destruction; of colonial legacies, exoticism and voyeuristic fascination").

Mutu’s work has exhibited internationally at galleries and museums worldwide including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Miami Art Museum, Tate Modern in London, the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York, museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010.

She participated in the 2008 Prospect 1 Biennial in New Orleans and the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions including Greater New York at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Barbican Centre in London, and USA Today at The Royal Academy in London.

She is represented by Barbara Gladstone in New York, Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles and Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

On February 23, 2010 Wangechi Mutu was honored by the Deutsche Bank as the first Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year. The prize is an exhibition in Berlin at Deutsche Guggenheim with the title; Wangechi Mutu "My Dirty Little Heaven".

External links

• Wangechi Mutu, Wangechi Mutu Studio, New York
• Wangechi Mutu, Barbara Gladstone, New York
• Wangechi Mutu, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles
• Wangechi Mutu, Victoria Miro Gallery, London
• Wangechi Mutu catalogue in artnet's Artist Works Catalogues
• Poco a Go-Go Exhibition review by David Hatcher in X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly
• Wangechi Mutu, The Saatchi Gallery
• Wangechi Mutu This You Call Civilization?, The Art Gallery of Ontario
• Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven / Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin Video 2010
• A visitors perspective of Mutu's exhibit My Dirty Little Heaven at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin

Publications

• A shady promise, Amazon.com
• In whose image, Amazon.com