In collages, films, sculptures and installations Wangechi Mutu (1972) reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. 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, Mutu’s work has often featured writhing female forms. Their skin an eruption of buboes, mutant appendices like gun shafts or machine gears sprouting from the sockets of joints, their bodies half human, half hyena, they offer a glimpse at the perversions of the body and the mind wrought by forces active in the oppression of women. More recently, exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, in her works 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.
Mutu has worked extensively with Mylar polyester film. Manipulating ink and acrylic paint into pools of colour she carefully applies to her surfaces imagery sampled from disparate sources - medical diagrams, fashion magazines, anthropology and botany texts, pornography, and traditional African arts. The resulting works are a rebuke to the conventions of aesthetics and ethnography and eroticism that underpin such publications, offering instead an existence that is riotously free of biological determinism or psychological conditioning. In recent collage-paintings a substrate of vinyl and linoleum allows for a more densely textured and sculptural ground. Painterly techniques are employed alongside Mutu's signature construction of images comprised of deftly cut-out and collaged forms. In addition, Mutu's visual language is further enriched by her use of unexpected materials such as tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and sand, amongst other media - many of which are imbued with their own cultural significations.
In 2019, the artist was featured in the Whitney Biennial, and was commissioned to create sculptures for The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue façade niches – the first-ever such installation on Met Museum's historic exterior – inaugurating a new annual series. TIME recently named the artist one of its ‘28 Outstanding Women’.
Wangechi Mutu received the 2010 Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award. Her work was featured at the 56th International Exhibition of Contemporary Art
© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Wangechi Mutu, or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only
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| Ms. Wangechi Mutu |
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| Wangechi's studio |
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| Throw, 2016 |
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| High Chair and Strange Fruit, 2005 |
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| Non, je ne regrette rien, 2007 |
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| Blackthrone VIII, 2012 |
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| The End of Eating Everything, 2013 |
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| Nguva na Nyoka, 2014 |
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| Chocolate Nguva, 2015 |
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| Flower head, 2015 |
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| Heeler II, 2016 |
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| Heeler IV, 2016 |
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| Mwotaji (The Dreamer), 2016 |
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| Tree Woman, 2016 |
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| A Promise to Communicate, 2017 |
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| Dengue II, 2017 |
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| This second Dreamer, 2017 |
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| Water Woman, 2017 |
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| Sentinel I, 2018 |
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| Underground Hornship, 2018 |
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| She Walks, 2019 detail |
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| The Seated, 2019 |
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| The Seated, 2019 |
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| MamaRay, 2020 |
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| Crcocodilus, 2020 |
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| I am Speaking, Can you hear me, 2020 |
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| For Whom the Bell Tolls, 2021 |
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| Sentinel V, 2021 |
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| In Two Canoe, 2022 |
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