The pair of sculptures look like fantastical beings that are part human, part plant. Gnarled limbs of bronze and soil seem to extend from their bodies into the floor of the Lobby Gallery of The New Museum in New York City.
The two works — “In Two Canoe” (2022) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (2019) — are a fitting metaphor for the artist who created them: Wangechi Mutu, known for her habit of branching out into various media and pulling inspiration from her environment.
“She has talked about having multiple roots,” says Margot Norton, the museum’s Allen and Lola Golding senior curator. Born in Kenya in 1972, Mutu moved to New York in the 1990s and now splits her time between studios in Brooklyn and Nairobi. It’s a dichotomy that is explored in the exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” open through June 4 and featuring more than 100 of her works created over a span of 25 years, spread across multiple floors.
The show’s title takes its name from a collage that Mutu created in 2003. The image — inspired by a photograph from National Geographic of two dogs fighting over a scrap of meat — places the animal heads on two women’s bodies, who pose like a pair of fashion models, highlighting themes that Mutu has addressed repeatedly throughout her career, such as transmutation and sexuality.
“She returns and circles back to things,” says curator Vivian Crockett, who curated the show with Norton. “Her interest in hybridity, animal life, biological life, microbial life — it’s striking to see the work together.”
For example, one room of the exhibit puts Mutu’s collage series “Histology of Different Classes of Uterine Tumors” (2006) next to her pottery-like renderings of viruses, which she began in 2016. These round works, textured with spikes and raised grooves, represent mumps, measles, dengue, Zika and other sicknesses. In a conversation with Norton and Crockett printed in the exhibition catalog, Mutu explains that she views them as unifiers: “The history of…
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