TORONTO - The Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu is known for socially charged works that explore female and cultural identity.
Her first solo exhibition at a major North American museum will be staged at the Art Gallery of Ontario from Feb. 24 to May 23.
"Wangechi Mutu: This You Call Civilization?" includes 12 large-scale collage-based works, as well as two videos and two installations.
One of the installations, "Sleeping Heads" from 2006, is "a haunting series of drawings" mounted on a gallery wall that "will be punctured and torn to reflect the post-colonial themes at the core of Mutu's work," said the gallery.
Mutu's collages combine found objects, magazine cuttings and other materials to create distorted representations of the female figure.
Born in Nairobi in 1972, Mutu moved to New York in the mid-'90s and received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000.
Her work is in the permanent collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art, L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art and other institutions.