Agnes Waruguru (Kenyan, b. 1994),
Lives and works in Nairobi
Agnes Waruguru is interested in everyday materials, especially those associated with the home and daily routines. Her practice is a weaving of slow meditative processes and quick reactive moments, at once formal and abstract, drawing together process and craft. Many of her works reference women’s practices, traditional cultural identifiers and personal identity politics as modes to engage with memory, place and expanding notions of home moving between Kenya the country of her birth and her adopted homes. She draws from personal experience to create new landscapes which can often be memory or emotionscapes that invite the viewer to look slowly, imagine and speculate.
Waruguru received a BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, USA. Her work has been exhibited in America, the Ivory Coast, France, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey and Kenya. She has participated in residencies in Kenya, at the Saba Artists Residency in Lamu and in Sydney, Australia. Waruguru participated in the inaugural edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale, South Africa in 2020 and had her first solo show Small Things to Consider at Circle Art Gallery later that same year. In 2022 she was nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prize and showed at the 22nd Biennial Sesc–Videobrasil in Sao Paulo in 2023. She recently completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She participated in the 69th Biennale di Venezia entitled 'Foreigners Everywhere' curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Waruguru had her second solo exhibition at Circle, What the Water Left Behind, in December 2024 and was featured in The Artsy Vanguard: Young Artists to Watch, an annual feature highlighting the most promising artists working today. This year she is participating in The Roundness of Loss at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Rememory at Garage Rotterdam, and the Past Is Just the Prologue exhibition at Lis10 Gallery in Hong Kong. Her work is included in the following collections: the Ford Foundation Collection, The African Arts Trust Collection, the Africa First Collection, the ARAK Collection, the Enasoit Collection, the Shulting Art Collection, and Collection INELCOM in Madrid.
In 2026, she will have solo exhibitions at Casa Masaccio in Italy and at Sanatorium Gallery in Istanbul.