Wangechi Mutu
"Hunt
Bury Flee"
515 West 24th Street, New York, NY
10011
October 30 - December 4
Opening Friday October 29, 6-8pm
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Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce our first
exhibition of work with Kenyan born, New York based artist Wangechi Mutu.
Spanning a wide range of media, Mutu employs interventionist methods of collage
and assemblage to inventively critique the institutions of power and
representation that regulate both the aesthetic and symbolic status of the
gendered and racialized body. Mining such diverse sources as fashion
magazines, pornography, and documentary photographs, Mutu's striking combination
of the surreal, grotesque, and seductive reflects the underlying currents of
violence and psycho-sexual tension embedded within the legacy of colonial
discourse and the American subconscious at
large.
This exhibition will feature new large-scale collage works
as well as a series of sculptural figurines, which create a dynamic exchange
between image and object. Made from ceramic, these moth-like creatures
investigate the links between a collection’s indexical condition and the
fetishization of its subject. Further exploring the hybridized female forms that
populate much of her work, Mutu's variegated surfaces move decisively between
dense layers of spliced images, glitter, paint, and beads to the swirling
calligraphic markings of snakes and hair that give voice to these dystopic
scenes of desire, horror, and excess. Mutu’s formal methods of collage and
montage allow for a mixing of photographic genres and styles culled from the
mass media—a representational strategy that not only resists binary
determinations but complicates and disrupts the very terms upon which we read
images. Through the often jarring incongruities between her collaged elements,
from the performative sexuality of pornographic poses to the ethno-centric
bodies captured under the anthropological gaze of National Geographic, Mutu
plays with the effects of displacement by constructing images that are always
already dysfunctional, disordered and destabilizing. What Mutu brilliantly
establishes in her charged environments and fantastical tableau is a framework
that challenges the question of difference and its attending modes of address,
suggesting that resolving these issues is, to borrow the words of the theorist
Barbara Johnson, “always a function of a specific interlocutionary situation—and
the answers, matters of strategy rather than truth.”
Born in 1972 in Nairobi, Mutu received her MFA from Yale
University. Mutu’s work has been the subject of solo shows throughout the U.S.
and abroad including: Wiels, Brussels; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Art Gallery
of Ontario; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Miami Art Museum. Her
work has also appeared in numerous group shows at institutions including:
Gotesborgs Kunsthalle, Sweden; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Liverpool,
UK; and the Studio Museum, New
York.
For further information please contact Sascha
Crasnow
+1 212 206 9300 or
scrasnow@gladstonegallery.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday,
10am-6pm
530 West 21st
Street
Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Mario
Merz
Through October
23
Marisa
Merz
“Living
Sculpture”
October 7 through November
20
12 Rue du Grand Cerf,
Brussels
Sol
LeWitt
Through October
30
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 10am-6pm, Sat
12pm-6pm
Gladstone
Gallery
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