In an essay posted by London’s Saatchi Gallery, author Patricia Ellis, writes, “Mutu’s figures are equally repulsive and attractive. From corruption and violence, Mutu creates a glamorous beauty. Her figures are empowered by their survivalist adaptation to atrocity, immunized and ‘improved’ by horror and victimization. Their exaggerated features are appropriated from lifestyle magazines and constructed from festive materials such as fairy dust and fun fur… Her work embodies a notion of identity crisis, where origin and ownership of cultural signifiers becomes an unsettling and dubious terrain. / Mutu’s collages seem both ancient and futuristic… Satirically identifying her ‘diseases’ as a sub/post-human monsters, she invents an equally primitive and prophetically alien species; a visionary futurism inclusive of cultural difference and self-determination.”

Mutu recently discussed the complex issues addressed in her collages, sculptures and videos with Interview magazine — from sexuality and race, to war and colonialism — stating, “I use the body as a metaphor and as a focal point from which to engage people in this discussion of, What is your war mask and battle uniform? What is your persona when you leave and enter the world of structures? What do people expect of you? That’s how the drawings came about. I took all of these psychological issues and my own personal stories and the stories of other women, and I manifested them as body injuries or mutilations or malformations or exaggerations or prostheses, as a way of talking about the need to extend, perforate, change, or shape-shift your body in order to exist.”
       
Mutu graduated with an MFA degree from Yale University in 2000 and received her BFA at Cooper Union College, New York. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art; the Miami Art Museum; ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and SikkemaJenkins Inc, New York. Her work was included in “Collage: The Unmonumental Picture” at the New Museum, New York; “Star Power: Museum as Body Electric,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; “Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art,” Brooklyn Museum, Brookly, N.Y.; “USA Today,” Royal Academy of Art, London; “Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism,” Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Passariano, Italy; “The F-Word: Female Vocals,” Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa.; “Out of Time: a contemporary view,” Museum of Modern Art, New York; “Africa Remix,” Kunstpalast Duesseldorf, Germany; “Pin-Up: Contemporary Collage and Drawing,” Tate Modern, London; “Fight or Flight,” Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; and the Studio Museum Harlem, New York; among others.

Mutu’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Studio Museum Harlem, Harlem, NY; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Altoids Collection/ The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin.

Mutu is currently showing drawings, collages and sculptures in a solo exhibition titled “Little Touched,” March 15 through May 5 at the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, located at 5795 West Washington Blvd., in Culver City, Los Angeles.

The upcoming illustrated lecture by Wangechi Mutu is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the UCSB Department of Art and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. Admission to the event is FREE. For more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at 805.893.3535 or visit online at www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.