Wangechi Mutu, La Petite Mort, 2007, Courtesy Wangechi Mutu
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Wangechi Mutu, Beet Root (detail), 2008. Collection of Janine Barrois, Santa Monica, CA. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
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Wangechi Mutu, Eat Drink Swan Man(detail), 2008. Collection of Gregory Feldman, NY. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
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Wangechi Mutu, The Bride who married a Camel's head, 2009. Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Wangechi Mutu and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
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Wangechi Mutu, Fallen Heads, 2010. Photo: Bill Orcutt. © Wangechi Mutu, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Victoria Miro Gallery
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Wangechi Mutu, Fallen Heads (detail), 2010. Photo: Bill Orcutt. © Wangechi Mutu, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Victoria Miro Gallery
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Wangechi Mutu, My Dirty Little Heaven (Installation Shot). Photo: Mathias Schormann. © Deutsche Guggenheim
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As Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year, Wangechi Mutu created a spectacular installation with My Dirty Little Heaven. After its premiere at the Deutsche Guggenheim, her exhibit now travels to Brussels, where it will be presented by WIELS, an institution that has established itself in Europe’s capital city as a dynamic and innovative forum for contemporary art. Thanks to outstanding shows by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Simon Starling, or Luc Tuymans, WIELS counts as a lively platform inviting the audience to a discourse and showing how divergent contemporary art can be. WIELS is an ideal platform for My Dirty Little Heaven, for Wangechi Mutu’s work is dedicated to internationality, diversity, and the linking of artistic questions with social concerns—themes that also play a pivotal role in Deutsche Bank’s commitment to art.
My Dirty Little Heaven possesses a spiritual dimension, yet the installation is foremost dedicated to the here and now, to mundane fears, needs, and longings. In a time in which large parts of mankind live below the poverty line, without access to sufficient food, education and equality, Mutu’s vision of heaven also remains imperfect and anything but pure: pieced together, dirty and improvised, full of scents, sensuous impressions and images, in which bodies, machines, and commodities are inextricably merged. Her work calls into question our notions of beauty, our image of the other, of the alien. At the end of 2010, an entire floor of the modernized towers of Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt will be dedicated to Wangechi Mutu’s artworks.
Wangechi Mutu
My Dirty Little Heaven
June 25 – Sept. 6, 2010
WIELS, Brussels
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