Wangechi Mutu will be the first living woman artist to present a solo show at Galleria Borghese, marking a milestone in the museum’s history.
Wangechi Mutu will be the first living woman artist to present a solo show at Galleria Borghese, marking a milestone in the museum’s history. The Kenyan-American artist is the first living woman artist to present a solo exhibition at Galleria Borghese. Taking over the entirety of the museum’s extraordinary 17th century architecture and gardens, her show reimagines the museum through suspended forms, radical spatial gestures, and new mythologies. As part of this landmark exhibition, an installation is also presented at the American Academy in Rome.
Debut Exhibition
From 10 June to 14 September 2025, Galleria Borghese is delighted to present the first solo exhibition dedicated to Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu in Italy. Titled Black Soil Poems and curated by Cloé Perrone, the show will unfold throughout the entirety of Cardinal Scipione’s residence, from the galleries, façade, to the Secret Gardens.
Poetic Intervention
Conceived as a site-specific intervention, it challenges classical tradition through suspensions, fragmented forms, and newly imagined mythologies, establishing a multilayered dialogue between the artist’s contemporary language and the museum’s symbolic institutional authority. Like the recent show on the Baroque poet Giovan Battista Marino, this project also stems from the institution’s ongoing interest in poetry.
Black Soil
The title evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s practice: poetic and mythological yet deeply connected to the social and material contexts of our time. “Black soil” — rich and malleable under the rain, almost like clay — appears across multiple geographies, including the Galleria Borghese’s Secret Gardens, which resonates with the artist’s imagination. From this soil, the sculptures seem to emerge, as if moulded by a primordial force, giving shape to stories, myths, memories, and poems. This metaphor underscores the generative and transformative power of her work; it is simultaneously rooted in materiality and open to multiple future interpretations.
New Vocabulary
Wangechi Mutu’s intervention introduces a new vocabulary into the institution’s historical and symbolic architecture. Through sculpture, installation, and moving images, the artist proposes an innovative approach to the museum space — one that challenges hierarchy, permanence, and fixed meaning. Her works question the visual weight and authority of the collection through suspension, fluidity, and fragmentation. In doing so, the museum is no longer a static container of objects, but a living organism, in continuous transformation, shaped by loss, adaptation, and reconfiguration.
Dual Structure
The exhibition is structured into two complementary sections. Inside the museum, Mutu radically reconsiders spatial orientation: her sculptures never obscure the collection; rather, they appear as subtle additions — ethereal presences that hover in mid-air, float lightly, or rest on horizontal surfaces. Works such as Ndege, Suspended Playtime, First Weeping Head and Second Weeping Head defy gravitational logic, delicately hanging from the ceilings and framing new lines of sight. This act of suspension is not merely formal: it introduces a shift in historical narratives and material hierarchies. The museum’s visual field is redrawn, opening new modes of perception as a result.
Material Transformation
The materials — bronze, wood, feathers, soil, paper, water, and wax — are central to the exhibition’s ethos. Bronze is stripped of its traditional connotations to become a vessel of ancestral memory, recovery, and multiplicity. By inserting organic, fluid, and mutable substances into a context traditionally dominated by marble, stucco, and gilded surfaces, the artist reaffirms a poetics of transformation and becoming — thus anticipating a theme that will be central to the museum’s 2026 exhibition program: metamorphosis.
Outdoor Presence
Black Soil Poems invites us to transcend fixed perspectives, shifting our gaze to allow the coexistence of multiple narratives revealing that the museum is not only a space of memory, but also a site of imagination and transformation. Wangechi Mutu’s artworks urge viewers to inhabit the institution’s space differently — to look not only at what is on display, but also at what has been removed, silenced, or made invisible.
Mythical Forms
Outdoors, a series of bronze sculptures populate the museum’s façade and Secret Gardens: The Seated I and The Seated IV — two contemporary caryatids originally created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019 that kickstarted The Façade Commission series — mark a significant moment of engagement between the artist and a major public institution. Also present are Nyoka, Heads in a Basket, Musa and Water Woman bronzes that reinterpret archetypal vessels as sites of transformation. With The End of eating Everything, Mutu expands her sculptural language into video, adding a temporal and immersive dimension to her ongoing exploration of myth. These works introduce new hybrid forms, part human, part mythological, part symbolic vessel, drawing on the traditions of East Africa and global cosmologies, as if emerging from a symbolic ground. In their quiet occupation of the gardens and architectural thresholds, they offer a counterbalance to the site’s classical order, challenging idealized form and linear narrative in favour of ambiguity, otherness, and spiritual presence.
Sound Memory
Sound, whether audible or implied, plays a subtle but pervasive role in the exhibition: from the suspended rhythm of Poems by my great Grandmother I, to the lyrics resting in Grains of War, drawn from Bob Marley’s song WAR. The song references Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974) and a key figure in anti-colonial movements, whose 1963 speech at the United Nations called for an end to racial injustice. Language becomes sculptural, and sound becomes a form of memory.
Final Installation
The exhibition continues at the American Academy in Rome, where Shavasana I is on view. This bronze figure, lying down and covered by a woven straw mat, takes its name from the yoga pose “shavasana” (corpse pose) and is inspired by a real-life incident. Its placement in the Academy’s atrium, surrounded by ancient Roman funerary inscriptions, emphasizes the themes of death, surrender, and the dignity of life.
Contemporary Commitment
With this show, Galleria Borghese continues its commitment to contemporary art, following recent exhibitions such as Giuseppe Penone: Universal Gestures (2023) and Louise Bourgeois: Unconscious Memories (2024), which foster new ways of seeing space, enriched with new connections seen through the eyes of a major international artist. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of FENDI, official sponsor of the show.
Pictures by Moma (Moma.org)
galleriaborghese.com
