Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) focuses on the violence inflicted on black and African women in the real world and their resilience, creating otherworldly images. Her early collages of woman portraits, which consisted of images cut from fashion, medical, pornographic, and documentary magazines, are her representative works.
She is also widely recognized for her Afrofuturistic aesthetic, which combines the history and culture of Africa and America with science technology, cosmology, and fantasy. Born in Kenya and raised amidst the remnants of colonialism, she draws motifs from African mythology and folklore to explore migration, globalization, and diasporic culture with a critique of colonialism.
Her solo exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” is currently on view at the New Museum, featuring sculptures of hybrid creatures that blend the dichotomies of female and male, human and animal, and black and white, as well as video and collage works.
German artist Anne Imhoff (b. 1978) has been a star in the art and fashion worlds in recent years, with exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious museums.
The artist is best known for her performance works, including ‘Faust (2017),’ which won the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, but she utilizes a variety of mediums, including video, sculpture, photography, and drawing. She transforms the gallery into a theater-like stage, creating a punk rock-inspired atmosphere that overwhelms the audience.
Sprüth Magers Gallery in Los Angeles is now presenting “EMO,” the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date in the United States. The exhibition’s title, EMO, refers to a subcategory of punk rock. The exhibition includes caged containers and billboards as installations and premiers two videos filmed in Russia in early 2022 before it invaded Ukraine.
Jack Whitten (born 1939) is an American black abstract painter born in Alabama during racial segregation. He moved to New York City in the 1960s and was heavily affected by mainstream Abstract Expressionism.
Later, Whitten tried to break with abstract expressionism to reflect his experience of black culture. Until his death in 2018, he consistently explored abstraction through geometric compositions, dark and dry spectral colors, and collages of tesserae.
“The Greek Alphabet Paintings (1975-1978),” now on show at Dia Beacon, shows Whitten’s series of paintings created during the transitional period of the 1970s. Composing according to the order of the alphabet, the series shows Whitten’s experimental journey toward his characteristic style of geometric abstraction. The series was scattered around the world, but the exhibition team brought them together for the first time.
Dia Beacon is New York’s leading nonprofit contemporary art institution, operated by the Dia Foundation, which supports artist-centered, unrestricted creative freedom.
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