Wangechi Mutu

This summer, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) takes over the entirety of Galleria Borghese’s 17th century architecture and gardens. She will be the first living woman artist to present a solo exhibition at the historic gallery. For this show, Mutu created new site-specific works, including Poem, an installation made from coffee powder, and Head, composed of pepper powder and glue, which will be on view alongside some of her most iconic works.

The project, which also moves, like the recently concluded exhibition on the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, from the museum’s interest in poetry, is conceived as a site-specific intervention that unfolds in the museum’s interior rooms, on the façade and in the Secret Gardens, challenges the classical tradition by traversing suspensions, fragmented forms and new imagined mythologies, and creates a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and ancient authority.