I’ve known of Wangechi Mutu’s work - but feel like I saw it for the first time today. Some artists work goes deep, and she is one. I’m a sucker for beautiful mark making that carries difficult resonances to it.
I guess I’m interested on a superficial level because of her use of bled inks, collage and layering. But then her work occupies and very interesting and challenging place. Her dialogue in the work confrontational and powerful. I hadn’t known of her sculpture before - so this is new to me. It’s encouraging to see an artist working between sculpture and drawing so successfully, I struggle to reconcile the two practices a lot of the time.
Mutut’s work broods on the paper and in content, it has a slow but purposeful movement to it, never feeling rushed. It’s fascinating how she controls time and pace with colours, textures and marks.
It has a sense of resistance and strong independance - creating her own aesthetic language. It also has a feel of the liminal, the sense of time, ghostly and refusing categorisation, the figures feel as though they are constantly evolving refusing the binary.
https://vielmetter.com/artists/wangechi-mutu