Portia Zvavahera is emerging as one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a painting practice that combines a unique combination of techniques – painting, printing, batik – to construct a visually beguiling personal cosmology featuring figures, creatures, shapes and shadows. Working in a studio in her home in Harare, she weaves together dreams, fantasy and stories of herself and her family into densely patterned, intensely coloured, mesmerising paintings.
This exhibition, whose title is in Shona, means ‘revelations’ and includes both new and recent paintings in order to reveal the depth and richness of Zhavahera’s practice. The focus is on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and especially Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques to register her personal visions of creatures and contexts. She creates monumental mindscapes that form ambitious decorative schema of imagined worlds and patterned palimpsests.
The exhibition draws on her earlier engagement with eros, intimacy and female experience, in a few key works from c 2012. But the bulk of the exhibition focuses on the period from 2020 to the present when the work becomes flatter, more richly patterned and oneiric. New works have been created especially for the exhibition, and these are shown to build on recent works with shared characteristics: they emerge from dreams; they are figurative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy; they combine paint and print, drawing and painting; they use repetition and pattern; they involve massed central forms over extended colour fields.
The exhibition is curated by Tamar Garb FBA, Durning Professor in the Department of History of Art at University College London. Garb is a recognised authority on contemporary art from Africa as well the works of women artists and feminist aesthetics. She has been in dialogue with Portia Zvavahera for approximately eight years and has already published on her in an essay on the ASIKO experimental art school that Zvavahera attended in Lagos in 2011.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication that extends the reach and scope of the exhibition. Written by Tamar Garb, it also includes an extraordinarily rich conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela.
In collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, the exhibition will be showing at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge from 22.10.24–16.02.25