Agnes Waruguru (b. 1994, Kenya) is a Nairobi-based artist working across painting, drawing, printmaking, needlework and installation. Waruguru treats painting as a site and process for exploring the materiality of objects and their capacity to act as markers of identity and carriers of personal histories. She works predominantly on cotton, using dyeing, pouring and spraying alongside brushwork. These painterly processes are combined with acts of making learned and inherited from the women in her life. Beadwork, sewing, needlework, embroidery and knitting are all incorporated in her work, intimately connecting aspects of personal identity with traditions of women’s work.
Waruguru’s work is directly related to her surroundings. Waruguru plays with scent, organic plant matter, light, water and the expansion of color to create environments that suspend time and evoke a sense of care, slowness and waiting. Exploring ideas of everyday life, home, personal histories, identity and the potential for creating new worlds through active material experimentation, practice and repetitions. Her work can be viewed as extended painting, playing with all the senses, making the viewer aware of their body; where one is within the artwork’s space.
Waruguru received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017. In 2020 Waruguru participated in the inaugural edition of the Stellenbosch Triennale, South Africa, and held her first solo exhibition, Small Things to Consider, at Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi. Recent select group exhibitions include: The Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize (2022), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, where she was nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs; A Bit of Unruly Complexity (2022), SANATORIUM Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey; I Dreamed A Place For You, Will You Visit? (2022), ROOF-A, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Lucid Dreams (2019), Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya; New Threads, Investigating Process and Material (2018), Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya. Residencies include Saba Artist Residency, Lamu, Kenya; Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Artspace Residency, Sydney, Aus. She has been nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunsten Prijs for Artists under 35, and exhibited in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024). She lives and works in Nairobi.