By Luciana Bellini
A Day of Rest is Wangari Mathenge’s second solo exhibition in London, and is made up of paintings and a room-size installation from her new series, which was inspired by the plight of domestic workers in Kenya. To create the pieces, Mathenge invited 20 female domestic workers to her studio and in the resulting portraits, each woman poses with an object of personal importance, as a way of taking control of their own stories.
Mathenge’s powerful figurative works are known for exploring the diasporic experience of establishing oneself away from one’s cultural origin and home, and these new pieces follow that thread. In the monumental paintings, Mathenge gives visibility to a marginalised group often dehumanised in media representations and compels us to consider each of these women as individuals, challenging our attitudes to their profession.
