Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
October 17, 2024–March 3, 2025
The Fondation Louis Vuitton announces Portia Zvavahera as the subject of Open Space #15. Open Space is a programme dedicated to the most contemporary artistic expression, in which national and international artists are invited to create a specific project for the Fondation.
Curated by Ludovic Delalande, Open Space #15 is Zvavahera’s first solo exhibition in France. For her show, the artist will be unfurling her phantasmagorical universe imbued with Zimbabwean religious and indigenous beliefs in an original monumental painting conceived for Galerie 8.
Portia Zvavahera’s paintings are the result of her nocturnal dreams, visions that she considers to be divine messages. They are about life and death, the material and the spiritual, love and solitude, an intimacy that touches on the universal. Driven by the need to transcribe the emotional intensity of her inner world, the artist summons ghostly figures–human and animal–whose roughly sketched silhouettes are diluted in an expressionist touch of contrasting color. With no element of setting or context, these appropriations seem to float freely on the surface of the large-format canvases. The compositions are based on superimpositions of shapes, flat areas and motifs painted in oil–with brush and stick–which intermingle and contrast with the parts left in reserve.
Learn more at Fondation Louis Vuitton.