The Brooklyn Rail

Is there a building with more ornate interiors than the Galleria Borghese in Rome? Erected as a retreat in the early seventeenth century by Pope Paul V’s nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a collector of antiquities and art, this impressive villa commands a park in the city’s Pinciano quartiere. Inside, every room is an orgy of polychrome decoration, with inlaid marble floors, elaborate gilded architraves, and frescoed ceilings providing eye-catching mise-en-scène for the gallery’s many masterpieces—including several astonishing sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, as well as paintings by Botticelli, Raphael, and Titian. For the casual viewer, the sumptuousness can feel overwhelming. What must it be like for an artist to show here?

This is the daunting setting for Black Soil Poems, a new exhibition of work by Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-American artist renowned for her representations of fantastical hybrid humanoids often associated with Afrofuturism. Curated by Cloé Perrone, the show is the second installment of an ongoing, and compelling, annual exhibition program presenting work by female artists instigated by the gallery’s director, Francesca Cappelletti. Last year, Cappelletti—an authority on Caravaggio, and co-curator of Caravaggio 2025, a rip-roaring recent retrospective at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, to which the Galleria Borghese lent three paintings—staged an exhibition of twenty sculptures by Louise Bourgeois.

Some artists, overawed, might go on the attack, and challenge the principles on which the gallery was founded, for good reason; in recent years, the Western tradition has, by many, been roughed up and shaken down. Mutu does go in for some of this: a bronze sculpture, Heads in a Basket (2021), installed in the gallery’s Secret Gardens alongside three others (including one representing a Black mermaid with great flipper-like hands and a sinuous tail), consists of several egg-like black forms that appear improbably to float in an inundated palm-leaf receptacle, as if memorialising anonymous drowned and decapitated victims.

Yet, mostly, Mutu adopts a different tactic. Including those external sculptures, twenty-five poetical artworks appear throughout the gallery and its grounds; The Seated I and The Seated IV (both 2019), two of four caryatid-like monumental bronze figures that Mutu created for the front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019, appear on the villa’s façade. On my visit, the polished discs which sprout surreally from one figure’s mouth and the other’s forehead concentrated sunlight like an “optic blast” unleashed by X-Men superhero Cyclops. An additional, unsettling bronze by Mutu, Shavasana I (2019), representing a figure wearing red high heels lying (mostly hidden) beneath a shroud-like mat, is on display off-site, at the American Academy in Rome.

Surprisingly, given the distinctiveness of Mutu’s art, as well as the seemingly out-of-place ephemerality of her materials (feathers, paper pulp, coffee, silk, red soil), her work, while never simpering, fits right in. This is even true of Suspended Playtime (2008), an installation of wonky spheres of scrunched-up black plastic bound with colourful twine, which, like something dreamed up by the late British artist Phyllida Barlow, hang from a ceiling like gigantic stringed conkers or oxygen masks suddenly released mid-flight. (In fact, the forms intentionally evoke makeshift soccer balls cobbled together by resourceful Kenyan children.)

Or consider Mutu’s intervention inside the Hall of the Emperors, which is lined with porphyry busts representing the twelve caesars. Prayers (2020) consists of four suspended festoons of spherical beads: some are grapefruit-sized; others, alternating with these, are smaller, like tennis balls; all have blood-red, waxy surfaces so dark that they appear black. Together, they frame the room’s centrepiece: a marble sculpture by Bernini, fizzing with dark, rampant energy, representing the abduction by Pluto, the god of the underworld, of the goddess Proserpina.

While providing a contrast with the pristine whiteness of Bernini’s sculpture, the somber color of Mutu’s baleful baubles, which strikes a funereal note, suits the tragedy of its subject, and even accentuates its malevolent drama—prompting a gnarly question about difficult art: why do we feel elation at the sight of a sculpture on the theme of rape?

Yet, Mutu’s beads—which also have a perversely festive quality, like a paper chain or a string of balloons at a party—emit a certain swagger, and lead the eye upwards to revel in the ceiling’s eighteenth-century painted designs. Thus, the entire space is activated for the viewer; in a lovely touch, each arc of beads, hung to form a shallow “U”, echoes the undulating shapes of garlands adorning pink colonnades depicted in the imagery above. This sort of subtle correspondence is, I suspect, what Cappelletti has in mind when she tells me that the interaction between Mutu’s work and the gallery’s “very complicated, super-decorated space” is “not a battle.”

In the same room, flanking this central installation, Mutu displays more bronze sculptures. Older Sisters (2019) is a pair of Brançusi-like heads representing young East African women with elaborate hairstyles and creases on the backs of their necks. According to Perrone, Mutu considers them a self-portrait in “two voices;” placed horizontally, their lips almost but don’t quite touch. Underground Hornship (2018) represents a root-like tangle of animal horns with gleaming, polished tips, like a miraculous piece of driftwood or some other natural wonder that once graced a princely Wunderkammer. In both cases, the works are positioned on mirrored surfaces on top of a pair of eighteenth-century dodecagonal tables by the silversmith Luigi Valadier, so that, again, the surrounding opulence is brought in, rather than resisted, achieving a sort of respectful, albeit uneasy, symbiosis.

By the time that I encountered Throned (2023), an abstracted figure fashioned from red soil and embellished with raspberry-coloured feathers, in the middle of the Psyche Room (where it’s surrounded by four Titians), I was primed to pick up on these correspondences: the sculpture’s gnarled surface has a bark-like quality, and made me think, at once, of Bernini’s life-sized sculpture of Apollo and Daphne downstairs, which relishes the transformation of a nymph’s smooth skin into leafy twigs and bumpy branches. Ingeniously, Mutu’s sculpture reverses this metamorphosis, by, seemingly, and miraculously, turning a tree into a sort of figure.