photo credit : PORTIA ZVAVAHERA 's art work at Fridericianum gallery
The Fridericianum will present the artist’s first institutional solo show in Germany from September 27, 2025 (with an opening on September 26) through February 8, 2026.
For over two decades, Portia Zvavahera has pursued an artistic language that navigates the thresholds of the seen and the unseen, locating painting as a conduit between dream, spirit, and lived experience.
Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, Zvavahera works from a deeply interior space, drawing upon dreams, visions, and inherited visual traditions that include Zimbabwean cultural motifs and Christian iconography.
Her paintings, however, resist simple classification; they do not illustrate spiritual experience so much as embody it, giving form to sensations and psychic states that elude ordinary articulation.
Zvavahera’s paintings often depict spectral, transformative bodies—figures caught between visibility and disappearance, between the physical world and the realm of spirit.
photo credit : PORTIA ZVAVAHERA 's art work at Fridericianum gallery
These emotionally charged compositions create an atmosphere where ecstasy, struggle, and introspection coexist, offering viewers a rare glimpse into the artist’s inner world.
The exhibition brings together significant works from 2019 to 2024, highlighting a period of intense evolution in her practice. This presentation follows a trajectory of major institutional recognition, including recent solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston (2025); the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2025); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2024); and presentations at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2024).
Zvavahera’s canvases often feature spectral figures—solitary or entwined, doubled or multiplied—caught in states of metamorphosis, rapture, or inner turmoil.
These figures inhabit richly textured worlds where the spiritual overlaps with the corporeal, and where dream logic coexists with physical immediacy.
Her art lives in the tension between what is revealed and what remains hidden, between presence and disappearance, giving the work a profound and haunting emotional resonance.
From September 27, 2025 (opening on September 26) to February 8, 2026, the Fridericianum will present the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Bringing together works made between 2019 and 2024, the exhibition offers a focused, immersive look into the evolution of Zvavahera’s practice.
photo credit : PORTIA ZVAVAHERA 's art work at Fridericianum gallery
The Kassel exhibition follows a series of significant institutional recognitions in recent years. Zvavahera has presented solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston (2025); at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (2025), previously exhibited at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2024); as well as at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2024) and the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean in Port Louis (2020).
Earlier in her career, she participated in the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and later returned to Venice for the 59th Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022). In 2018, her work was featured in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
This exhibition is held under the patronage of Her Excellency Alice Mashingaidze, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Zimbabwe.
