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Introduction
Victoria Miro is delighted to present The SeasSpirit, an exhibition of new collage- paintings by Wangechi Mutu.
Wangechi Mutu engages in a distinctive form of mythmaking, often connecting the human body with the natural world. For her forthcoming exhibition, the artist returns to the subject of water, a theme she has explored throughout her practice, not only as a mythical realm but also as a fragile, symbiotic ecosystem.
In a new series of collage-paintings, Mutu conjures a cast of feminine water spirits – figures that are at once powerful, awe-inspiring and unsettling. Imagined as protectors, companions and guides, these aquatic beings can be understood as symbolic inhabitants of both the sea and the subconscious. Created with Venice in mind, this body of work resonates with the city’s enigmatic character – a place where land and water, history and myth, continually converge.Wangechi Mutu exhibits in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh (until 22 November 2026).
In The End, Where All began, EdEN, on view in the Giardini, Mutu presents a cosmological installation that reimagines the Garden of Eden, inspired by the origin story of her ancestral people and filtered through an eco-feminist, African diasporic lens.
The bronze sculpture SimbiSiren, on view in the Arsenale, is her latest iteration of aquatic creatures that fuse woman, animal and the supernatural. The title refers to a Kongo freshwater guardian spirit who mediates between the living and ancestral worlds.
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Works
08Wangechi Mutu
In her diverse practice, Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. At its core, her work emphasises the powerful and inescapable symbiotic connections that determine our common fate.
The artist was first recognised for paintings and collages concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially Black women, in the contemporary world. More recently, exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Her practice has been described as engaging in her own unique form of myth-making, one in which the interweaving of fact with fiction opens up possibilities for another group of symbolic female characterisations, markedly different from those that appear in either classical history or popular culture.
About the Artist
Wangechi Mutu was born in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she works in New York and Nairobi.
Recent selected solo exhibitions include Black Soil Poems, Galleria Borghese, Rome (2025); Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined, New Museum, New York (2023), travelling to New Orleans Museum of Art (2024); Wangechi Mutu, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor (2022), Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?, Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2021); A Promise to Communicate, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); and Wangechi Mutu: The End of eating Everything?, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2018).
Recent group exhibitions include Spirit in the Land, The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville (2024); Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2024); Blaque Orbit, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2024); Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, First Museum of Art, Nashville (2023); A Gateway to Possible Worlds: Art & Science-fiction at Centre Pompidou-Metz, Paris (2023); Feminine power: the divine to the demonic, The British Museum, London (2022–23); In the Black Fantastic,, Hayward Gallery, London (2022); What Is Left Unspoken, Love, at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022) and Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans (2021–22).
Mutu’s work is in the collections of museums including Brooklyn Art Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Tate, London.
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