Wangechi Mutu Knihy

Accompanying a 2022 exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New York, comprising large-scale bronzes, earthworks, and films by Wangechi Mutu, this publication includes a foreword by John P. Stern, President of Storm King, an essay situating Mutu's sculptures within an art historical context by Storm King's Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Nora Lawrence, an artist's statement by Mutu, and an essay by contributing author, Aisha Tandiwe Bell. Installation photography of Mutu's works sited in Storm King's expansive landscape, and inside the Art Center's Museum Building, illustrate the publication. The book is designed by Omnivore in collaboration with the Wangechi Mutu Studio. Exhibition: Storm King Art Center, New York, USA (21.05-07.11.2022)

Kenyan sculptor and anthropologist Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) mines ethnographic photography, fashion, sport, porn and popular-science publications such as National Geographic to develop her fierce critique of the deformation of the female body by consumerism in elegant, tapering spirals of collage and drawing. Mutu refers to her hybrid women as "warrior women" whom she augments and contorts in prosthetic treatments. Often indefinably horrific, Mutu's complexly patterned works are often pitched between decorative abstraction and mutant figuration, and as Klaus Ottman points out in an essay included here, her hybrid creatures evoke "the genocidal horrors inflicted by African rebels in Sierra Leone and Sudanese soldiers in Darfur while also recalling the imaginative heads of Archimboldo; the erotic contortions of Egon Schiele; and the photomontages of Hannah Höch." Mutu's work, presented here in over 130 color images, has advanced a fresh treatment of black female identity, consumer culture and postcolonialism.