Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa

Publisher: Kettle's Yard

Publication Date: 2024

Text by Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama, Tamar Garb, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Fiona Bradley, Andrew Nairne  This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera’s practice. The focus will be on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and large details will highlight Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques that build rich surfaces to create her private cosmology of creatures and contexts.

The book will feature a significant new essay from curator Tamar Garb and will centre around an extensive conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discussing Zvavahera’s engagement with eros, intimacy and female-centred experience.

The book will open up how Zvavahera’s works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

Details

Publisher: Kettle's Yard

Artist: Portia Zvavahera

Publication Date: 2024

ISBN: 9781904561705

Retail: $39.95 | £30

Binding: Softcover

Dimensions: 11.5 x 9 in

Pages: 144

Reproductions: 41 illustrations

Artist and Contributors

Portia Zvavahera

In her paintings, artist Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985) gives form to emotions that manifest from other realms beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. Zvavahera draws on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

$39.95