Portia Zvavahera

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.’