Wangechi Mutu

Place: Nairobi

Born: 1972

Biography:

Wangechi Mutu is a prominent international contemporary artist known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York for over twenty years. Mutu’s work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance all the while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma and environmental destruction.
Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where she was educated at Loreto Convent Msongari and later 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 Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996 and a master's degree in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000.
Mutu's work has been exhibited 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 Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in March 2010. Her first U.S. solo exhibition, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey in the United States opened at Nasher Museum of Art on 21 March 2013. A Fantastic Journey subsequently traveled to the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in October 2013. She has held recent one-person shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina; the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Illinois; and Miami Art Museum.
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.
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. Titled My Dirty Little Heaven, the show traveled in June 2010 to the Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Forest, Belgium.
In Fall 2013, the creative team of Wangechi Mutu took part in the main project of the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.
In 2013, Mutu was awarded the BlackStar Film Festival Audience Award for Favorite Experimental Film in Philadelphia, PA for her film The End of Eating Everything, as well as the Brooklyn Museum Artist of the Year, Brooklyn, NY.
In 2014 she participated in 'The Divine Comedy. Heaven, hell, purgatory from the perspective of African contemporary artists' Museum of Modern Art (MMK), Frankfurt / Main, curated by Simon Njami. Wangechi Mutu was awarded the 2014 United States Artist Grant.
In 2015, Wangechi Mutu participated in the 56th Venice Biennale's International Art Exhibition titled "All The World's Futures", curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues. She also participated in the Dak'Art Biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, the Paris Triennial: Intense Proximity, the International Center of Photography's Triennial, and the Moscow Biennale.
In 2016, her film The End of Carrying All was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.The film depicts Mutu herself crossing a landscape with a basket filling up with consumer goods as the landscape changes, ending with a volcanic eruption. In 2016, she also participated in several group exhibits, including “Blackness in Abstraction,” at the Pace Gallery in New York, “Black Pulp!” at the International Print Center in New York, and “Africans in America” at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Museum of Contemporary Art, Montréal); the Brooklyn Museum; and Tate Modern in London.
She is represented by Barbara Gladstone in New York, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Los Angeles and Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
Wangechi Mutu's work crosses a variety of mediums, including collage, video, performance, and sculpture, and investigates themes of gender, race, and colonialism. A recurring theme of Mutu's work is her various depictions of femininity. Mutu uses the feminine subject in her art, even when the figures are more or less unrecognizable, whether by using the form itself or the texture and patterns the figure is made from. Her use of otherworldly depictions for women, many times shown in a seemingly sexual or sensual pose, brings about discussion of the objectification of women. Specifically, Mutu addresses the hyper-objectification of black female bodies and has used an otherworldly nature to reiterate the fictitious nature of society's depictions of black women. Whether through delicate lined patterns or familiar feminine builds, Mutu's various ways of representing feminine qualities is said to enhance the strength of the images or the significance of the issues presented. Many of Mutu's artworks are known to be interpreted in contradictory ways, both seen as complicit to problematic society and as hopeful for future change in society. It's also been said that Mutu's use of such intentionally repulsive or otherworldly imagery may help woman to step away from perfection as it is presented in society and instead embrace their own imperfections and become more accepting of others flaws as well. Mutu frequently uses "grotesque" textures in her artwork and has cited her mother's medical books on tropical diseases as an inspiration, stating that there is "nothing more insanely visually interesting and repulsive than a body infected with tropical disease; these are diseases that grow and fester and become larger than the being that they have infected, almost."

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