Phillips: Evening and Day Editions (October 2016)

Wangechi Mutu explores the violence and misrepresentation that women, particularly black women, experience in the contemporary world. Referencing artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Chris Ofili, and Romare Bearden, as well as art-historical movements like Surrealism, her drawings and collages graft together images from anthropological, ethnographic and medical texts, Vogue, and pornography. Mutu commonly works on paper or Mylar, applying her sampled figures along with ink, acrylic paint, and materials like plastic pearls. She has spoken of her art—which includes sculpture and installations with similar coiled, hybrid imagery—as using the aesthetic of rejection and wretchedness to explore the hopeful or sublime.