Work by Wangechi Mutu

This monographic exhibition devoted to Wangechi Mutu will be an opportunity to showcase her installation Moth Girls, 2010, recently acquired by the Musée. Combining poetic symbolism and socio-political critique, this remarkable work embeds a memory of the land and its age-old traditions in current aesthetic and political concerns.

The installation comprises a hundred or so ceramic figurines with leather wings and feather antennae. Pinned to the walls in rows, these part-human, part-animal figures form a monumental, strikingly beautiful bestiary on an intrusive scale and with a recurring, and disturbing, hybrid female image.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, Wangechi Mutu lives and works in New York. Highly regarded as a multidisciplinary artist, Mutu has exhibited regularly since the late 1990s. She has developed a spectacular, politically and socially engaged body of work revolving mainly around female representation, matters of identity and the African diaspora.

In 2010, Mutu was named Deutsche Bank’s first Artist of the Year, an award that earned her an exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Her work may be found in the following museum collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Miami Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.