Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven

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.