Portia Zvavahera combines loose, gestural and expressive brushwork with detailed, decorative textile-like patterns – formed from precise mark-making and printmaking techniques – to create rich, patchwork quilt paintings, rendered in large scale. From a Western perspective, Zvavahera’s paintings may appear to be  Klimt-like in their composition and scale, yet the artist’s visual language and references are distinctly rooted in her homeland of Zimbabwe. The works are like dreamscapes, abundant with immersive imagery formed from meditations on themes essential to the human condition, such as love, death, pleasure, pain and loss. While the ethereal works depict women, family members and animals, often faceless and spectral, they are always a representation of the artist, who relates that ‘it is me in the paintings… I can only speak about myself.’

Harare

Berlin Biennial

Berlin

Venice Biennial

Venice

Johannesburg

Stevenson

Cape Town

London

Modern Art

New York City

Andrew Kreps Gallery

David Lewis

Stephen Friedman Gallery

Düsseldorf

Galerie Hans Mayer

David Zwirner

Milan

Ica Milano

Miami

El Espacio Twenty Three

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art

Moscow

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Graz

Kunsthaus Graz

Gasworks

Portia Zvavahera

Chicago

University Of Chicago

Wonderfully Made [1]

What I See Beyond Feeling [1]

Wonderfully Made [2]

Handidi Kuzviona

Sacred Vessels

What I Saw

Embraced and Protected in You 

Vese Vakanddibata (They all gave me strength)

I Can Feel It in My Eyes [26]