WANGECHI MUTU artist's work  |  about the artist  |  biography  |  articles  |  other resources

Articles about Wangechi Mutu

The Africana QA: Artist Wangechi Mutu

By Aïda Mashaka Croal

Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu isn't interested in pretty pictures. In her absurdist collages she takes magazine images of women and makes them almost monstrous. Her figures boast transplanted eyes that seem too large, too small, too far apart or too close together to be human. She uses textured paper to create ornate headdresses that bring horns to mind, or the hair of some Star Trek alien. Patterned sheets render skin echoing satellite photos of outer space. Mutu's "Profile" series subverts the Western portrait in every way - there are no seamless oil renderings here, nor the attempt to recreate that aesthetic - yet her figures maintain a curious appeal. A freak like me might even call them beautiful and then wonder what the heck is "too small," "too large" or "too far apart to be human."

This is a large part of Mutu's point. The Kenyan raised, US trained artist (she's got degrees in the arts from Cooper Union and Yale Universities) likes to trap her viewers with layers of visual metaphor, forcing them to question assumptions about race, gender, geography, history and beauty. A trained sculptor and anthropologist, Mutu's work has evolved from faux-artifact making (back when she favored sculpture) to a collage process that collides everyday images with mythological and historical narrative. "Creatures," currently on exhibit at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY, is a comprehensive showcase of Mutu's work of the past year, featuring numerous "portraits" and full body figures as well as sculptural elements (horns figure prominently). We met a few days before the exhibit was set to open, and talked while she was busily working to install one of the show's most ambitious offerings - a mural featuring a large double-headed snake-like creature whose body traces a fictive journey from the North to the South of Africa. Read the entire article Source: (archive.blackvoices.com)

Out of Africa Female forms that tell a tale of torture

By Michelle Weinberg

The collage drawings of female figures by Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu on view at Miami Art Museum are harsh and seductive, violent yet beautiful. Collectively titled "Amazing Grace," their mottled surfaces glitter like distant planets, like microscopic organisms or rare fungi. They are ephemeral but also monumental in size (many drawings measure 86 by 51 inches). Her images feature weblike tangles created by plants and their roots, out of which humanoid forms twitch and jive, seemingly elastic and animated. A certain science-fiction element pervades some of these works, causing images of body-snatching aliens and swamp things to haunt the imagination. The women Mutu depicts could be zombified witches or innocent victims of real violence. The artist observed that "Females carry the marks, language, and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body." This duality of desire and repulsion keeps her work vibrating in the psyche. It's easy to get lost in the blotchy surfaces of skin that Mutu has created for her female figures, vixens both as glamorous and reptilian as a leotarded David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust days. She covers Mylar drafting film in ink washes of reds and earth tones that flow and congeal like splats of blood as they coagulate on the surface. Sometimes Mutu creates an airbrushlike sheen by spraying millions of particles onto those enormous sheets of Mylar. References to scarification of the body, plastic surgery, prostheses, and pathology derive from Mutu's anthropological training. In spite of the dispassionate remove with which she examines her subjects -- reflecting her academic and data-sifting side, the scientist within conducting an autopsy -- she manages to bring a complexity of feeling to this forensic occupation. Read the entire article
Source: (www.miaminewtimes.com)

Wangechi Mutu's Extreme Makeovers

Art On Paper, Vol.8, No. 6, July/August 2004

By Merrily Kerr

Her studio was just as I expected: body parts littered everywhere, a tray full of lips on the table, a pair of sleek legs in strappy heels affixed to the wall. In the telling, Wangechi Mutu's workspace at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is a resident artist, sounds like a campy crime scene. In fact, it is a sort of laboratory in which she uses collage and drawing on paper and Mylar to inscribe real crime stories onto hybrid bodies. "Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male," says Mutu. "Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body." This includes everything from the violence perpetrated against innocent civilians in war zones to the 'modifications' made in order to follow fashion. Artists from Cindy Sherman to Orlan have explored the chameleon-like nature of female bodies for decades. So what makes Mutu's work unique? Apart from being skilled in montage she coherently refers to race, politics, fashion, and African identity in portraits that pack an aesthetic punch. This cocktail of influences strongly recalls Weimar artist Hannah Hoch's collages of African artifacts and European bodies in her portrait series, From an Ethnographic Museum. But Hoch's montages beg the question, like ethnography itself, of whether her then-colonial subjects themselves are represented as they think they are or in a manner that reflects Hoch's view of them. Eighty years later, an artist who was raised in Kenya and has traveled and lived overseas ever since, gives an answer as complex as her experience. After completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Mutu found herself in New York without the school's resources and faced with a crisis of direction. With pen and paper as her chief art supplies, she created the Pin Up Series (2001), which established her interest in adaptable female bodies. In two grids of twelve small images, topless women preen and posture for the viewer like calendar girls. "I wanted you to walk up to them assuming you were going to see these pretty, interestingly posed females," explains Mutu. "It takes people some time to see that every single one of them has some trauma or alteration that is severe and aggressive." The women, who strike come-hither poses, are amputees. The series was inspired by violence in Sierra Leone, where an illegal diamond trade fueled fighting that maimed many civilians - in effect, trading one person's well-being for another's beauty. Read the entire article
Source: (www.akrylic.com)

back to top

Copyright 2003-2009 © The Saatchi Gallery : London Contemporary Art Gallery