A Shady Promise

Wangechi Mutu is fond of using the body as vocabulary for expressing human experience, personal narratives and as a way of exploring ideas of cultural identity. Mutu turns “the figure” into a malleable field on which realities are collapsed, disputes are fought, psychology is physically apparent, disappeared tribes are found and a love of sensual surfaces is rekindled. For Wangechi, collage is the ultimate form through which to emphasize the visceral capacities of imagery, using and misusing found pictures, Mutu so enjoys the act of discovering, touching, dissecting and reconfiguring narratives. Her works underhandedly pick at myths about physical appearance emphasizing the love of material, trends towards excessive wastefulness, revealing that rage born from the desire to unevenly scramble and distribute natural resources. Wangechi Mutu was born and raised in Kenya (1972), educated in Nairobi, Wales and the United States perhaps the act of convoluting myths, debunking Art Historical hierarchies and scratching away cultural dogmas is an extension of her various “upbringings”. Having studied Anthropology and Sculpture she treats imagery and the figure with a combination of irreverence and tactility infusing her creatures, their diseases and their worlds with succulence, enigma eroticism and visual debate.