Wangechi Mutu introduces the Borghese Gallery exhibits to Rome's museums
In the heart of Rome, the Borghese Gallery, a 17th-century palace housing a vast collection of European classical art, now plays host to an intriguing contemporary intervention. American artist Wangechi Mutu, born in Kenya in 1972, has brought her unique blend of African, futuristic, and classical European art to the gallery with her sculpture Water Woman.
Water Woman, a bronze figure made of polished leather, is a striking presence both outdoors in the Secret Gardens and on the façade. She stretches her fish tail, stands on her palmated arms, and offers a fleshy smile that's hard to trust. With pointed elf ears and a siren-like appearance, she keeps watch over her sisters in the exhibition.
Mutu's work dialogues spatially and symbolically with the Borghese’s historic classical sculptures by artists like Bernini. By invoking African mythologies and aesthetics, and blending these with futuristic and surreal elements, she creates a hybrid language that challenges the authority and historical narratives embedded in the European classical art collection.
This combination disrupts the Renaissance calm with the "insistence of the structural violence of the present" and offers a planetary commons vision that redefines inclusion and decolonization beyond mere replacement of power structures.
The sculpture is part of Mutu's debut show Black Soil Poems at the Galleria Borghese, where she reshapes the classical Baroque and Renaissance context with fantastical three-dimensional allegories that draw from African imagery and a Black feminist perspective.
Lavinia Fontana, the first to paint a nude woman in Minerva dressing (1613), is one of the few women represented in the collections at the Borghese Gallery. However, Mutu's work populates part of the exhibition with powerful, hieratic, serene, semi-human female figures, part animal, challenging traditional European classical art norms.
Space is scarce at the Borghese Gallery, as it houses a vast collection of masterpieces, including Bernini's sculptures and Caravaggio's self-portrait as a pallid, bloated god, titled The Sick Bacchus. Yet, Mutu bravely finds her space amidst the thousand other masterpieces, expanding the museum’s narrative to include voices and histories previously excluded.
- Wangechi Mutu's sculpture, Water Woman, in the Borghese Gallery, serves as an intriguing intersection of health-and-wellness, lifestyle, and women's health narratives, as it challenges traditional European classical art norms with its powerful, semi-human female figures.
- The contemporary intervention by Wangechi Mutu at the Borghese Gallery, with her sculpture Water Woman, offers a compelling vision of health-and-wellness and lifestyle that transcends the historical narratives embedded in the European classical art collection, making a significant contribution to the discourse of science and decolonization.
