Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she works in New York and Nairobi.

In her diverse practice, Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. At its core, her work emphasises the powerful and inescapable symbiotic connections that determine our common fate.

The artist was first recognised for paintings and collages concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially Black women, in the contemporary world. More recently, exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Her practice has been described as engaging in her own unique form of myth-making, one in which the interweaving of fact with fiction opens up possibilities for another group of symbolic female characterisations, markedly different from those that appear in either classical history or popular culture.