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Speaking of Artists I Adore

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Meet Wangechi Mutu.

Her work seeks to destabilize established visual cues, to free tamed images. Her medium is collage worked through with her own special brand of richly-textured ink wash; she uses pictures from National Geographic, Glamour, Penthouse. Collage allows her both to layer meanings and to shift rapidly back and forth between beautiful and eerie, delicate and coarse, documentarian and fantastic. At first glance, her female figures look as lush and unchallenging as Zack Smith’s suicide nudes; then they fall apart and re-form themselves into new creatures entirely.

Some more pictures from the Saatchi Gallery site:

“Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.”

6 thoughts on Speaking of Artists I Adore

  2. I love that she’s reclaiming images of sex, ethnocentrist and sexist porn (per the list above). Feels a lot more righteous than Chris Ofili (though I love scatalogical-izing the “virgin” mary).

  3. I love that she’s reclaiming images of sex, ethnocentrist and sexist porn (per the list above). Feels a lot more righteous than Chris Ofili (though I love scatalogical-izing the “virgin” mary).

    While it’s never a good idea to forget that artists are capable of self-serving revision, too, I’m not sure that was his point in the first place. He uses elephant dung in his artwork all the time; it may not have been an attempt to shock or to assault the sacred with the profane (although I’m aware that the dung wasn’t the only scatalogicla element of the piece). And some of the analyses I’ve read have been feminist critiques of the Virgin mythos and of the way women’s bodies and Black women’s bodies are used in art.

    I have trouble with Ofili for the same reason I have trouble with Picasso: his stuff isn’t as pretty to me. I worry that I dismiss the conceptual implications of his art because I just don’t like it as much as I like Mutu’s.

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