Kudzanai-Violet Hwami

Having fled her homeland due to the political unrest and turmoil when she was a child, Zimbabwe-born painter Kudzanai-Violet Hwami expresses her personal experiences of dislocation, displacement and fragmentation through her striking figurative paintings. The artist is interested in the ‘collapsing of geography and time and space’ symptomatic of a globalised world and high-speed internet, through which both people and information can travel quickly. Because of this collapse, and with the inspiration of Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom the artist describes as able to “think in collage”, Hwami’s paintings often display a patchwork of enigmatic transtemporal fragments, scattered and regathered vignettes. The artist often uses her own family photographs as source material, using the practice of painting as a means of reconnection, or estrangement. The background of Family Portrait (2017) is rendered in large smudges of primary colour, while a family sits on a sofa in the foreground, one of their faces scratched out in white paint, and a faint vertical line which bisects the painting, as well as the family itself. Behind them is another family portrait painted as an eerie photo negative.