For our final exhibition of the year, we have invited Dennis Muraguri back to Circle for his second solo exhibition with a return to his quirky and curious mixed media sculptures. After taking a break from sculpture for 5 years, he wished to revisit this medium and to find new approaches. Using recycled wood as a foundation, the addition of disparate materials merges seamlessly to yield something new. Muraguri makes his choice of media and form seem effortless as if all the parts are natural extensions of each other.

Muraguri describes the new work as ‘less mechanical and more figurative and influenced by the politics of the day’. In this new body of work, rumours and misinformation, things left hanging in the air, form the basis for these constructions of heads in conversation. We find Muraguri’s engaged in gossip and debate. In some cases words that spring from their mouths link them inextricably, forming a shared, flawed consciousness.

Dennis Muraguri was born in 1980 in Naivasha and is a multimedia artist, based in Nairobi, working in painting, printmaking and sculpture. He graduated from the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Arts with a diploma in Painting and Art History and has been a resident artist at the Kuona Artists’ Collective since 2005.

Mostly recognized for his woodcut prints inspired by ‘matatu’ (Kenyan minibuses) his 3 dimensional works are less known. Following his first solo at Circle in 2016, Circle has shown his prints and sculptures at the 1-54 Art Fair in London in 2018, the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2016. Muraguri was invited to participate in the Kochi Biennale 2019 and the Kesho Kutwa exhibition at the National Museums of Kenya in 2021.