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Portia Zvavahera – Zvakazarurwa

4 stars

 

Bad dreams burst through the walls in Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition of paintings, which sees the Zimbabwean artist dig deep into both her psyche and the spiritual forces that drive her. The result in Zvavahera’s first exhibition in Europe is an epic series of works driven by an unholy alliance of fear and love channelled from Zvavahera’s fevered imagination. The rats may be poised to pounce, but through the swirl of colours where they hide, her only mission is to keep her children safe from harm.

 

This moves from the early devotions of ‘His Presence’ (2013), ‘Labour Ward’ (2012) and ‘Labour Pains’ (2012) in the Fruitmarket’s downstairs gallery, to the more recent night terrors of works made in the last year shown upstairs. This accidentally symbolic ascension charts a journey that is both holy and possessed. With titles like ‘Fighting Energies’ (2024’), ‘Hide There’ (2024) and ‘Lifted Away’ (2024), it is no accident that the title of the exhibition is the Shona word for revelations.

 

Zvavahera’s paintings are highly charged torrents of emotion expressed with a deep-set urgency to exorcise all the monsters that haunt her nightmares. There is pain here, but there is also a faith in some higher being that comes through a sense of movement, with figures’ hands outstretched, whether in praise or else protecting their brood.

 

Presented in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, where it showed first, for all the horrors on show in Zvakazarurwa, it is love that drives everything Zvavahera does. This gives her work a physical as well as a spiritual energy that transcends the badness even as it is made manifest in painted form. It is this strength that saves her. For now at least, all Zvavahera’s demons are purged in a vivid display of higher power.

 

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh until 25thMay


The List, April 2025

 

Ends 



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