Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to announce that Wangari Mathenge's The Ascendants XVIII (She Is Here And So Are You), 2021, has been acquired by Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), Dallas, TX.
The painting was part of Mathenge's solo exhibition You Are Here at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in 2021. The piece belongs to the artist's ongoing series, The Ascendants, in which figurative compositions explore hybridity across the continent and diaspora, reflecting on personal experience of movement between the two.
[Women] in Mathenge’s explosively colourful domestic settings – replete with Kanga textiles and other signifiers of their subjects’ East African heritage – have agency, either contemplating themselves and their own thoughts or observing us, the viewer, with magnificent hauteur.
- Sophie Barling, Apollo Magazine (2021)
Wangari Mathenge (b. Nairobi, Kenya 1973) holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021). Recent institutional exhibitions include Stretching the Body at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and Black American Portraits, at LACMA, Los Angeles. Further collections include Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Elie Khouri Art Foundation, Dubai; Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, Norway, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.
