Portia Zvavahera’s Spectral Dream Worlds Arrive in New York

The artist's large-scale canvases become a surface against which she records and interprets her disquieting inner visions, in an act of cathartic transformation.

Her paintings feature groupings of spectral human figures, occasionally encircled by otherworldly beasts, loosely rendered in oil stick, often arcing across the upper half of the canvas or plummeting diagonally, against a gestural wash of colour that forms the backdrop of the composition.

The defining feature of Zvavahera's works, however, are the explosive layers of meticulously printed patterns, which the artist gradually builds up using a batik wax-resist printing method.

In some instances, the cascading patterns cover her figures in a lace-like veil, or in others enshrouds them in a vibrant, floral setting, bringing a sense of movement to the otherwise relatively flat appearance of her work.

At 36 years old, Zvavahera is one of the blue-chip gallery's youngest artists. Born and currently based in Harare, she studied at its BAT Visual Arts Studio from 2003 to 2005, before obtaining her Diploma in Visual Arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

It was not until 2014, however, that Zvavahera received her first solo show outside of Zimbabwe, when she was taken on by South Africa's Stevenson gallery, who now co-represent the artist with David Zwirner.

This early seal of approval from the highly respected Cape Town and Johannesburg-based gallery was a sure sign of things to come for Zvavahera.

Beginning with her participation in the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, the artist has had a number of important institutional and biennial appearances. These include group shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2017), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), Pérez Art Museum Miami (2020), and Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris (2021).

Along with these exhibitions have come her first few museum acquisitions, including by the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others.

One might speculate that there were possibly a few other dealers vying for her representation in Europe and the U.S., following group shows at top commercial galleries on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years, including Stephen Friedman Gallery and Modern Art in London, and Andrew Kreps Gallery and David Lewis Gallery in New York.

More recently, secondary market demand appears to have begun for the work, too, with one 2019 painting flipped at Phillips last year selling in excess of double its high estimate.

In some respects, however, despite the growing momentum for her work institutionally and commercially in the last eight years or so, her work was still somewhat under the radar.

As David Zwirner himself commented in Artnews, the fact Zvavahera lives and works in Harare 'puts her outside the traditional centres of gravity of the art world, and that has given only a small group of collectors and curators a chance to see the work in person.' With her New York debut, this is surely about to change. —[O]