Beatrice Wanjiku (Kenyan, born 1978)
Study 1 for the Strait Jacket series, 2015
Signed ‘signature’ (lower right)
Mixed media on paper
75 x 55 cm
Ksh 160,000-200,000
(US$ 1,455-1,820)
Sold Ksh 258,280
Provenance: acquired direct from the artist through One Off Contemporary Art Gallery
Beatrice Wanjiku’s paintings explore the tension between external pressures and our internal state of being. Her most recent Strait Jacket series interrogates cultural expectations imposed on the individual by traditional notions and value systems of marriage, love and child bearing; relating this to her experience as a female artist living and working in Nairobi.
In 2000, she received a diploma from the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Arts in Nairobi and quickly became a distinguished artist on the Kenyan contemporary art scene. Wanjiku’s work has been shown and collected widely in Kenya. Major international exhibitions include Africa Now: Emerging artists from a continent on the move, Washington DC, 2008, Africa Within: Many eyes one soul, London, 2006 and Pop-Up Africa at GAFRA, London, 2014.
Wanjiku won an award to attend the 2012 Dak’Art Biennale from the Goethe Institut’s Moving Africa Fund and in May 2013, her work sold at the Bonham’s Africa Now, charity auction in London.