Wangechi Mutu - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay


    Wangechi Mutu combines the physical properties of paper collage and oil paint to construct images of fantastical, cyborg women.These mutated figures, simultaneously perverse and elegant, address myths about gender and ethnicity that exist within Mutu’s visual perception of identity. The physicality of these works lends itself to an understanding of the female form and ideals of beauty, an ever-present subject in Mutu’s work. The very nature of the medium evokes a sense of rupture and collision that is further heightened by Mutu’s deconstructive anthropology. Dispelling the stereotypes embodied by the female body, Mutu weaves her own stories, a technique of contemporary myth-making for an endangered cultural heritage.
    These unstable, or mobile, points of reference in Mutu’s work bespeak the multitude of global positions that exemplify not only the artist’s own truly global biography, but also the ever-shifting ground of postmodern media culture…In ways both thematically explicit and formally buried, Wangechi Mutu has in the course her still-young career fashioned an art that is at once personal, political, and, most importantly, her own. J. Kantor. “Wangechi Mutu,” Vitamin D: New Perspective in Drawing, NewYork, 2006, p. 214)

156

Soul on a Peg Leg

2001

Ink, watercolor, gouache, sequins, paper and felt collage on paper.

59 x 43 1/2 in. (150 x 110.5 cm).

Signed and dated “Wangechi Mutu 2001” lower right.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $193,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York