Catherine Anyango Grünewald was born in Nairobi, Kenya into a family of Kenyan and Swedish descent in 1982. She studied Graphic Design and Illustration at Central Saint Martins (2001–4) and Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art (2004–6) in London, where she also taught Visual Research between 2006 and 2016. Grünewald's is best known for her drawings examining how emotional and intangible experiences can disrupt physical or domestic spaces. She is also inspired by the aftermath of crimes and the victim's right to a dignified 'last image.' Grünewald’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad's <em>Heart of Darkness</em> into a graphic novel (2010) was awarded the <em>Observer</em>’s Graphic Novel of the Month.
Artist, graphic novelist and lecturer, Catherine Anyango Grünewald was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1982 into a family of Kenyan and Swedish descent. Moving to London, she studied Graphic Design and Illustration at Central Saint Martins (2001–4) and Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art (2004–6), where she also taught Visual Research between 2006 and 2016. She is currently senior lecturer in illustration at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm, Sweden.
Grünewald employs various media such as drawing, film, sculpture, and mise-en-scene techniques to examine how emotional and intangible experiences can disrupt physical or domestic spaces. Her research concentrates on drawing and the materiality of drawing tools to investigate meaning. Using soap, pencil, and eraser on paper to convey complex and sensitive themes, she creates an abundance of marks on the paper surface that serve as a representation of the violated body and also reveal her own artistic process. Her drawings are displayed in graphic novels, sequences and animations. Grünewald’s work delves into the historical and contemporary systemic oppression of marginalised and underrepresented individuals. The amount of effort and work that goes into each piece is a direct tribute to the subjects who were victims of violent domestic or institutional crimes. Artist Sara Anstis described Grünewald’s relationship with graphite, paper, and erasers as ‘tactile and painful’ (Creative Magazine).
Grünewald’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness into a graphic novel was published in 2010 and was highly praised by critics. Rachel Cooke noted in the Guardian that Grünewald ‘has brought to life Conrad's nightmare journey far more successfully than the movie-makers who came before her; I'm certain that in the future, I will think of Heart of Darkness, and see only her drawings. Anyango has worked in sepia tones, and her sketches are cloudy not only with river mist but with foreboding’ (Cooke 2010, p. 47). The book was awarded the Observer’s Graphic Novel of the Month and has been translated into eight languages. Grünewald declared that with her images she ‘wanted to draw the reader in with seductive imagery, and then show them that even in the most beautiful of settings, terrible things can happen’ (Jones 2010, p. 14). It was after reading Heart of Darkness and discovering the horrors of the Belgian occupation of the Congo that Grünewald first became interested in crime scenes. As a result of her research into the brutality of this period, she became ‘emotionally raw and sensitive,’ particularly towards the portrayal of victims of crime and the crimes themselves (Le Cool London). She subsequently created a series of drawings called Last Seen which explored the aftermath of crimes and the victim's right to a dignified 'last image.' Grünewald also illustrated Scandorama, a dystopian Scandinavian graphic novel written by Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo (2018) and is currently working on her own graphic novel, Terminal, which explores how guilt and corruption impacts a city's physical form.
In 2017, she contributed the hand drawn animations Live, Moments ago. The Death of Michael Brown (2015) and The Slow Death of a Woman in Aleppo (2017), alongside the pencil drawing Bad Dream: The Death of Walter Scott, to the exhibition Graphic Witness at the Drawing Room, London (2017), which explored the way drawings can both document injustices and become agents that encourage us to act. Grünewald’s graphite drawing The Death of Trayvon Martin, based on a photo of the crime scene following the shooting of the African-American teenager in Florida in 2012, featured in the exhibition Drawing Attention: Emerging British Artists at the British Museum (2022). Grünewald used two different types of graphite – one, very soft and one, harder – to replicate the photograph, the soft and hard graphite creating alternating areas of matte and reflective surfaces that change as the viewer moves around the work. Grünewald's work also featured in Waste Not, Want It, London Design Festival, Bloomberg Space, London (2014), Derwent Drawing Prize, The Mall Galleries, London (2015) and Comix Creatrix - Women Making Comics, House of Illustration, London (2016). In 2019 she was awarded the Navigator Art on Paper Prize, the largest award for work on paper in the world. She is represented by Riflemaker Gallery in London. Grünewald is currently working on a graphic novel adaptation of Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking (Random House, forthcoming). In 2021, Phaidon’s Vitamin D3 included her among the 100 best practitioners of contemporary drawing. Alongside other established graphic novelists, Grünewald is part of the SelfMadeHero’s Graphic Anthology Programme (GAP), a mentoring programme designed to find, develop, publish and promote emerging comic-book artists by emerging creators of colour from across the UK. In the UK public domain her work is represented in the British Museum Collection, London.