ART CITIES:London-Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera’s vast canvases contain a world of dreamscapes heavy with burdens of our futures and unresolved pasts. The women depicted in her paintings, however, are not always in despair. Often they appear to be tenderly holding spaces for each other; there is no pain without comfort. Ever present in Zvavahera’s work are the entangled worlds of the spiritual and the ancestral, worlds that are protective, demanding, and at times even petty.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Portia Zvavahera presents new paintings in her solo exhibition “Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira”. The title translates from Shona to English as “I took my rest in sleep and then I awoke for He sustained me”. On view in The Upper Room at the David Zwirner Gallery;sLondon location, this will be Zvavahera’s first solo presentation in Europe. In her paintings, Zvavahera gives form to emotions that manifest from other realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realised through layers of vibrant colour and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition. In these new works, produced at a time of intense solitude and collective struggle across the globe, Zvavahera returns to herself and to her dreams. Her particular process of alternating painting and printing results in images that communicate complex emotions in a play of tension and release. Zvavahera establishes the base of these canvases with preparatory sketches, drawing from a powerful visual vocabulary comprising women, her family, and shape-shifting animals, in scenes both metaphorical and fantastical. The real concerns of members of her community and daily life become situated in the larger dreamscape of her subconscious. These paintings represent an effort to transcend suffering through individual practices of ritual and devotion. As Zvavahera states, “It is me in the paintings.… I can only speak about myself”.  Against a starry purple background, a beast (part bull, part dog) looms ominously over two figures. Its presence is seen by the artist as a necessary evil, embodying that which must be battled and overcome: it is ‘the problem but also the solution’, in her words. In other works, a solitary central figure is simultaneously repressed by, and depicted emerging from, a surrounding group. In several paintings she makes use of intricate patterns taken from her own floral or classical Zimbabwean designs: a repeated scalloped edge is stamped using a block print across two different canvases, mingling with translucent red, green, orange, and purple inks. A wax-resist process found in batik textiles is used to reveal decorative elements beneath layers of pigment and, in a new technique for the artist, to create a vibrating field of marks in her cosmic surrounds. Joining an intimate process of self-reflection with her singular perspective, Zvavahera, in the words of curator Gabi Ngcobo, ‘speaks of feeling both challenged by the differences in her understanding of spirituality and optimistic about the recognition of a shared resistance against the powers that have threatened our humanity. Through her mind’s eye Zvavahera transports us deeper and deeper towards our true selves. You can escape but you’ll always need to come back.’2

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, Duration: 15/9-31/10/20, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Tue 10:00-20:00, www.davidzwirner.com