Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to announced that Wangari Mathenge's painting The Ascendants IX (Just Like My Parents’ House, I’ve Become A Visitor) is included in Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo's group exhibition 'Stretching the Body'.
The Stretching the Body group exhibition brings together a group of thirteen women artists from different generations and geographical origins, who through the medium of painting reflect on the genre of portraiture and the theme of the human figure.
The exhibition title is a play on words in the English language, referencing the classic action of stretching the canvas and the physical exercise of stretching in order to highlight the space of painting as a physical and conceptual perimeter within which to explore new notions of corporeality. Through a variety of stylistic stratagems, the exhibition artists distance themselves from the canon of representing the body in the Western pictorial tradition, investigating issues central to today, like racial identity, gender identity, power relations, memory and knowledge as they traverse physical experience.
