Wangechi Mutu. Photo: Kathryn Parker Almanas
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Wangechi Mutu. Exhuming Gluttony: Another Requiem (detail), 2011. Daskalopoulos Collection, Athens, Greece. © FMGBGuggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2011. Photograph: Erika Barahona-Ede
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Wangechi Mutu, Metha (detail), 2010. Originally commissioned by Deutsche Bank for My Dirty Little Heaven, 2010. Image courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. © the artist
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Wangechi Mutu, Moth Collection, 2010. Sender Collection, New York. Image courtesy and © the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
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Wangechi Mutu, The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head, 2009.. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. © Wangechi Mutu. Photo by Mathias Schormann
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Wangechi Mutu, Funkalicious fruit field, 2007. Collection of Glenn Scott Wright, London. Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London. © Wangechi Mutu.
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Wangechi Mutu, Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002. Collection of Peter Norton, New York. © Wangechi Mutu.
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Wangechi Mutu, Yo Mama, 2003. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. © Wangechi Mutu. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Photo by David Allison
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In 2010, Wangechi Mutu exhibited the project My Dirty Little Heaven at the Deutsche Guggenheim as Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year.” Now, the works of the Kenyan artist, who lives in New York, will be on show in two renowned museums. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney presents a Deutsche Bank-sponsored solo exhibition, while the Nasher Museum shows the artist’s first major show in the US, titled A Fantastic Journey. The museum is located on the campus of Duke University
in Durham, North Carolina; the so-called “Harvard of the South” is
considered to be one of the leading universities in the US. The
exhibition also includes the collage The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head (2009) from the Deutsche Bank Collection.
Both
shows present the full spectrum of Mutu’s work. Along with the collages
that made her internationally well known, the artist’s video works,
sculptures, and installations will also be on view. In Sydney, for
instance, viewers can experience Exhuming Gluttony: A Lover’s Requiem
(2006)—a veritably claustrophobic space whose dark walls are shot
through with bullets and decorated with animal furs. More than a
hundred bottles hang over of a wooden banquet table with a
red wine dripping out of them. Abundance and waste, violence and
exploitation are in the air. Mutu “dirties” the rational white cube of
the exhibition space and leads the viewer into a dim, nightmarish
arrangement that recalls Africa’s bloody colonial history.
Mutu
also questions the white cube in the Nasher Museum: a monumental wall
drawing, sculptural works, collages, and films come together here to
create a gesamtkunstwerk, as in her project for Deutsche Bank. In A Fantastic Journey,
the artist’s sketchbooks, which provide direct insight into the process
that gives rise to her works, will be shown publicly for the first
time. One of the exhibition’s highlights is Mutu’s first animated
video, made in collaboration with the hip-hop singer and producer Santigold.
Mutu
resists the one-dimensional notion that she’s an “African” artist whose
work draws from the culture of her home country. Like many artists
living in the Diaspora, she combines elements of her native culture
with Western imagery. This fraught relationship has become a central
theme of her work. Mutu’s art resembles a surreal cosmos populated by
an entire armada of hybrid creatures—crosses between human, animal, and
plant, monster and machine. Beauty and terror are inseparably
intertwined in her work.
Following the premiere in the Nasher Museum, A Fantastic Journey will travel to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
3/21 – 7/21/2013
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
Wangechi Mutu
5/23 – 8/11/2013
Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney
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