ART CITIES:N.York-Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures (part human, animal, plant, and machine) in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification.  Wangechi Mutu’s remarkable body of work touches on such issues as sexuality, ecology, politics, and the rhythms and chaos that govern the world. Her paintings, sculptures, and collages, often enriched with culturally-charged materials including tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and sand, interweave fact with fiction, generating a unique form of myth-making that sets her apart from classical history or popular culture.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive

The New Museum presents “Intertwined”, a major solo exhibition of work by Wangechi Mutu, bringing together more than one hundred works across painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, and film to present the full breadth of her practice from the mid-1990s to today. The exhibition takes over the entire museum, encompassing the three main floors, lobby, “Screens Series” program on the lower level, seventh floor Sky Room, and a new commission for the building’s glass façade. The exhibition includes a some of Mutu’s earliest works on paper and small-scale sculptures and extend to new and recent works, some made of natural materials sourced in Nairobi such as wood and soil and others cast in bronze. The Second Floor of the exhibition draws connections between the artist’s collage-based practice and her work in sculpture, including the diptych “Yo Mama” (2003), originally commissioned by the New Museum in 2003 for the exhibition “Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.” Mutu’s diptych pays tribute to Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, the mother of the Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. A pioneering feminist, said to have been the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car, Anikulapo-Kuti fought against the practice of female genital mutilation. Mutu depicts her symbolically as the biblical Eve, triumphantly slinging a headless serpent across her shoulder while her stiletto boot mutilates the snake, an intrusive phallus. In the artist’s words, “The figure exists in an imaginary outer space, clutching a mangled serpent, the phallic and mythological creature that instigated the downfall of Eve…. The image and title are infested with the inherent contradictions that were the experience of a radical like Funmilayo. A visionary and brave fighter, she was caught in the upheaval of the creation of a nation’s identity”. “Yo Mama” is emblematic of Mutu’s collage strategy, which often mingles the glamorous sensuality of full lips and curled lashes with haunting violence and severed limbs. In appropriating details from magazine clippings, Mutu may generate facial features mismatched in scale, resulting in figures simultaneously alluring and strange. These layered references and remixed body politics contribute to an interrogation of otherness, race, alienation, and female representation. This floors also feature more recent examples of experimental collages, which fluidly combine corporeal, mechanical, and botanical forms. The Third Floor continues to examine the evolution of Mutu’s sculptural practice, alongside works in video and collage, with an emphasis on her use of natural materials. The Fourth Floor bring together a selection of Mutu’s collages from the “Subterranea” series(2021–22) alongside recent largescale works in bronze. Mutu’s sculpture “In Two Canoe” (2021) occupies the Museum’s Lobby Gallery with a site-specific intervention by the artist.  Deeply rooted in art history, Mutu excavates the modes of representation throughout recorded time to arrive at new forms of womanhood with an eye towards an undiscovered future. In “Crocodylus”, the human figure is perched on top of a gigantic reptile. Her legs tuck neatly under her own body and are embedded in the animal’s abdomen, giving the crocodile additional equilibrium. The rider harnesses the animal’s strength with her hands inside its enormous jaws, unafraid and unconcerned of its pattern of sharp teeth, mirrored in her own mouth. Both the woman and the crocodile are wrapped in a stylized exoskeleton with unbroken lines running all the way up and down each of their bodies blending where one begins and the other ends.  This combination of human, hero and animal is portrayed in Mutu’s monumental work, “MamaRay.” That represents a chimeric relationship with power, poise, and dynamism. “MamaRay’s” body envelops and emerges from the space around her, demonstrating a harmony of balance and strength, as well as a tenderness encapsulated by the sheer force of nature. Employing similar techniques in her earliest painting-collages and assemblage works, which critique the power of unequal representation that regulate the aesthetic and symbolic status of the gendered and racialized body, Mutu’s three-dimensional hybrid humanoid figures propose a new kind of heroic image, the triumphant goddess female.  Mutu first gained acclaim in the late 1990s for her collage-based work exploring camouflage and transformation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. Informed in part by her undergraduate training in anthropology and by her experience living and working in New York and Nairobi, Mutu’s practice consistently challenges the ways in which cultures and histories have traditionally been classified. “Intertwined” offers audiences the opportunity to see thematic throughlines and progressions across the arc of Mutu’s influential career.

Photo: Wangechi Mutu, Yo Mama, 2003. Ink, mica flakes, acrylic, pressure-sensitive film, cut-and-pasted printed paper, and painted paper on paper, diptych, overall 59 1/8 × 85 in (150.2 × 215.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Edemeyer

Info: Curators: Vivian Crockett and Lola Goldring, Assistant Curator: Ian Wallace, The New Museum, 235 Bowery New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/3-4/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11;00-18:00, www.newmuseum.org/