Startling, seductive art

Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu certainly made an impression at the Royal Academy's Saatchi exhibition, USA Today, last year.

Focusing on the female figure, she used images cut out from magazines and pages torn from medical journals to create visual associations that were as unsettling as they were arresting.

Mutu's hugely inventive visual vocabulary continues to be both startling and seductive. And in a new series of large works on paper, her imagery has become even more fantastical.

Amid gorgeous washes of inky paint, tentacle-like organic matter erupting from the surface of paper and clusters of plastic pearls, Mutu has created a series of elaborate collaged images of the deep sea in which the heads of earth-bound creatures mutate into fantastical sea monsters. While their glittering surfaces are beautifully jewel-like, the images themselves are a little grotesque.

Upstairs, Mutu has created a large-scale installation. Drawing water from the canal outside the gallery, water-filled tubes are attached to transparent stiletto shoes in looping curves which snake across the gallery floor. The literature accompanying the exhibition goes on, a bit too much, about sacred spaces and the worship of female creativity. One can certainly dispense with this, and the installation, both of which add little to the exhibition, and just concentrate on Mutu's wonderfully inventive works on paper.

Until Jan 19, Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road N1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7336 8109. Tube: Old Street

Wangechi Mutu
Victoria Miro
Wharf Road, N1 7RW