Wangechi Mutu

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Wangechi Mutu (* 1972 in Nairobi , Kenya ) is a Kenyan artist. Mutu is best known for her collages of female figures and faces on plastic sheeting , as well as for room installations in recent years . She lives and works in New York .

Life

From 1989 to 1991 Wangechi Mutu attended the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales . She then went to New York City and completed her art studies at Cooper Union , where she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996 . She then went to Yale University , where she graduated in 2000 with a Master of Fine Arts .

In 1997 Wangechi Mutu presented her work in the exhibition Life's Little Necessities at the Biennale in Johannesburg , South Africa , in the same year they were part of the exhibition The Castle in Cape Town . In the following years she participated in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and other countries.

In 2005 Mutu had her first two solo exhibitions in art museums: the Pérez Art Museum Miami showed an installation entitled Amazing Grace , which thematically deals with the Atlantic slave trade and - more generally - uprooted people and their history in Florida . In the same year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showed newer works on paper and a site-specific installation .

In 2010, Wangechi Mutu was named Artist of the Year 2010 by Deutsche Bank and presented with a solo exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin under the title My Dirty Little Heaven .

Work

Pin-up
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Forensic Forms
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The Ark Collection
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Exhuming Gluttony: A Lovers' Requiem
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Wangechi Mutu mainly works with collages from fashion magazines, pornography, motorcycle magazines, books and other publications, which she puts together into pictures on PET plastic film . She deals with "how women are presented in the media." And how they are "perceived, but also how society sees itself." In addition to this examination of the modern media, she focuses on events in recent history mainly on humanitarian disasters.

In her 2001 cycle Pin-Up , inspired by the civil war in Sierra Leone , she portrayed twelve women who at first glance correspond to erotic pin-up representations and, on closer inspection, are disfigured by mutilations. Other series included the Forensic Forms (2004), in which she put together portraits from collages with different body parts, and The Ark Collection (2006) from collages with erotic images of women on postcards and crowns (also 2006).

In more recent works such as the installation Exhuming Gluttony: A Lovers' Requiem from 2006, Mutu makes use of various objects, thereby expanding her range of work to include sculpture . In this work she redesigned the gallery rooms of Salon 94 on the Upper East Side together with the British architect David Adjaye . In this installation she covered one wall with furs and another wall riddled with bullets. A construct of dripping wine bottles hung from the ceiling above a dining table with a multitude of legs of different lengths. The room was also filled with a pungent smell that was also intended to appeal to the sense of smell.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wangechi Mutu Takes Over New York's Metropolitan Museum , The African Exponent , August 29, 2019, accessed September 6, 2019.
  2. ↑ MAM presenets Kenyan Bron Artist in First Solo Exhibition ( Memento from July 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 35 kB): Wangechi Mutu — Amazing Grace , July 22 to October 9, 2005.
  3. ^ New Work: Wangechi Mutu , SFMOMA, December 16, 2005 to April 2, 2006.
  4. ^ A b c Matthew Evans: We categorize the things we fear. An encounter with Wangechi Mutu Interview in Deutsche Bank's ArtMag.
  5. ↑ Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover's Requiem. Retrieved May 30, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Mutu, Wangechi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH Nairobi , Kenya