Wangechi Mutu
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, educated in Britain and America and resident in New York since the mid-nineties, Wangechi Mutu's work has often seemed to bear the gaze of a perpetual outsider, simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the discovery of another fresh outrage in the lands in which she travels. Much of Mutu's work to date has been concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially black women, in the contemporary world. Her paintings and collages often feature 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. Mutu commonly works on paper or Mylar polyester film. Manipulating ink and acrylic paint into pools of colour she carefully applies to her surfaces imagery sampled from disparate sources- Vogue, National Geographic, hunting, motorbike and porn magazines. 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.