Open Space #15 Portia Zvavahera "IMBA YERUMBIDZO"
© Portia Zvavahera Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner
- Place
- Gallery 8
For Open Space #15, her first solo show in France, Portia Zvavahera unfurls her phantasmagorical universe imbued with Zimbabwean religious and indigenous beliefs in an original monumental painting conceived for Galerie 8.
Portia Zvavahera's paintings are the result of her nocturnal dreams, visions that she considers to be divine messages. They're about life and death, the material and the spiritual, love and solitude, an intimacy that touches on the universal. Driven by the need to transcribe the emotional intensity of her inner world, the artist summons ghostly figures - human and animal - whose roughly sketched silhouettes are diluted in an expressionist touch of contrasting colors. With no element of setting or context, these apparitions seem to float freely on the surface of large-format canvases. The compositions are based on a superimposition of shapes, flat areas and motifs painted in oil - with brush and stick - which intermingle and contrast with the parts left in reserve.
Free access with a ticket for the "Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &..." exhibition .
Portia Zvavahera, Kudonhedzwa kwemazizi (Fallen owls), 2022, Oil based printing ink and oil bar on linen
© Portia Zvavahera Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner
Curator
Ludovic Delalande (Fondation Louis Vuitton)
OPEN SPACE PROGRAMME
Open Space is a program dedicated to contemporary art, offering the possibility of a first solo exhibition and the production of a new work.
Portia Zvavahera
Portia Zvavahera (1985) is a Zimbabwean painter who lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. Portia Zvavahera studied at the BAT Visual Art Studios of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2004 before graduating in Fine Art from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.
The artist has had several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014-2023), as well as a solo show with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017) alongside solo and group exhibitions with David Zwirner in London, New York and Los Angeles (2020-2024). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe (Harare) presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, presented her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She participated in the exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs in the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.
In October 2024, Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge (England) and Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh) will co-organize Zvakazarurwa, Portia Zvavahera's first solo exhibition in England.
Portia Zvavahera is represented by Stevenson (Cape Town, Johannesburg) and David Zwirner (London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Los Angeles).
