Portia Zvavahera’s phantasmagorical paintings captivate us: large-scale colourful canvases integrate oil painting and printmaking, blending Western and African stylistic and technical traditions in a unique voice. Her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, Zvakazarurwa, is on view at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge until February 16, 2025. Central to her paintings are vibrant layers of printed patterns: Zvavahera fashions these floral motifs using a batik wax-resisting printing method. Take, for example, her painting Vachengeti vangu (My Guardian) (2020): two female figures, enshrouded in a cascading pattern of lace-like florals, sit on a burning red ground while facing teal-coloured palm foliage. Often, the artist also leaves a white expanse, intending for divine presence to find its way into the painting. In this work, Zvavahera first applied the female protagonists’ contours in oil stick, before using a meditative process of applying printing ink and subtracting wax to achieve the respective floral motifs that bring a sense of movement onto the otherwise flat surface.

Zvavahera first began working in this style in the early 2000s as a student at Harare Polytechnic, under the rigorous tutelage of artist and activist Chikonzero Chazunguza, who encouraged students to develop two or more techniques simultaneously. Zvavahera turns inwards to what she describes as ‘her spiritual eyes’. Dreams and the emotions that linger on her mind upon waking are her repositories: she impresses these visually, first on sketchbook pages and, later, on canvas, while simultaneously drawing on her family’s tradition of dreamtelling as a collective ritual. In a recent conversation with Ludovic Delalande, curator at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (who organised the artist’s Open Space Commission), Zvavahera recalls, “Growing up, my grandmother and my mother always asked about our dreams [...]. They [would] always remember their dreams. Sometimes, I’d wake up with no recollection of my dreams, but because I wanted to make them happy, I’d always want to wake up and tell them something. [These days] if I don’t remember my dream, it is so painful! I’m miserable. I have trained myself to remember.”

Not all of her dreams become visual records, though: In an interview with Zimbabwean singer and composer Netsayi Chigwendere for BOMB Magazine, Zvavahera reveals the cathartic technique behind her painterly process: positive memories seldom find representation on canvas; rather, the artist concentrates on emotionally painful recollections, remedying them on canvas. So too, in Zvakazarurwa, which means revelations in Shona: bad omens lurk in the exhibition, from maternal scenes of childbirth, indicating agonising labour pains, to a foreboding dreamscape about a mischief of menacing rats.

Autobiographical in nature, Zvavahera’s dream works feature a recurring character: the silhouette of a pregnant figure. In the gallery to the right, with early works from 2012–2020 on display, the focus lies almost entirely on realistic renderings of female rites of passage, such as marriage and motherhood. Female pain – as evidenced in the writhing bodies in the paintings Labour Pains and Labour Ward (both 2012) – is palpable throughout the gallery. Curator Tamar Garb has referred to these visceral, raw compositions as ‘gynocentric’. Elsewhere, female figures are involved in gestures of worship, such as bowing and kneeling in prayer, like in His Presence (2013). Yet, Zvavahera often plays with ambiguity, leaving it to the viewer to decide whether the protagonists in her paintings are celebrating, mourning or experiencing something else entirely.

Central to the gallery on the left is a dreamscape about a nocturnal visitation by demonic rats. Here, Zvavahera explores the potential of her dreams as source material for eight, narrative-defying paintings, each offering a different response or resolution. In Shona culture, dreams about animals of any kind symbolise or signify an impending spiritual attack. Yet rather than condemning the red-eyed rodents, Zvavahera remains defiant, submitting these demonic creatures to interrogation and experimentation: from shrinking them in size to overlaying their evil nature with divine presence in the form of angelic entities, bridal veils, protective cloaks and burning bushes. She muses, “When I have bad dreams, I don’t just want to paint the bad parts because that is almost like celebrating that evil dream, so I put something positive in the painting so that it becomes like a prayer.” This also reflects in her choice of colour: gone are the dried menstrual blood-like hues (i.e. black, brown, orange) from her earlier works; in come warm washes of scarlet and violet to mark a shift from painful recollections of childbirth for more abstract depictions of motherhood, namely the subconscious fears that engulf her as a mother. As a way to counteract these fears, Zvavahera’s choice of titles reminds one of poetic encouragement or spiritual spells.

In Hide There (2024), three, perhaps four, red-eyed rodents lurk above a kneeling figure whose body has been shrouded with floral lace patterns. It’s the first time Zvavahera has printed the lace directly onto the relieved surface of the painting. On the white expanse, the burning bush in flame red suggests divine presence and the preservation of innocence in the biblical Book of Exodus, while the rodents are being kept away by feathery angelic wings. Elsewhere, in Fighting Energies 2 (2024), a proverbial Madonna della Misericordia outspreads her protective cloak to shield the pregnant protagonist from the scurry of red-eyed rodents. In Ndirikumabvisa (2024), an angel descends to gather the demonic rats in their outstretched arms.

Based primarily in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has a studio in the same building as a funeral parlour, Zvavahera often paints on residency to harness "the energy that comes with the [respective] space and the city" into her work. For instance, in 2022, she painted Rangani (devise your strategy) at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. Yet not all locations allow for an essential spiritual connection to time and place, as the artist intimated to writer Allie Biswas in a 2023 monograph published by David Zwirner: during her 2017 residency at Gasworks in London, Zvavahera initially struggled to dream and needed weekly visits to Kew Garden to remedy the disconnect from her spiritual side. As such, unlike her concurring Open Space commission Imba yerumbidzo (House of Praise) at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, which was created for and adapted with the circular-shaped Gallery 8, most paintings on display at Kettle’s Yard were not made with the exhibition galleries in Cambridge and Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket in mind, where the show will travel to in March 2025.

There is one more work in the show: Zvavahera’s painting Lifted Away (2024) has been tucked away in Kettle’s Yard founders Jim and Helen Ede’s house, adjacent to the temporary exhibition galleries on the ground floor. Here, the painting of an angel figure hovers protectively over the house’s downstairs extension, a large space with high ceilings, as if to shield not only the artist’s family but also the house’s permanent collection on display in the gallery downstairs. Thus, with all of Zvavahera’s turbulent inner troubles melting into thin air, Lifted Away presents a triumphant resolution to the exhibition.