Portia Zvavahera: Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika

Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe) draws from her dreams to create layered paintings that evoke moments of transition and transcendence. For the artist, the act of painting is akin to an act of worship. Across her work, Zvavahera engages deeply with the African Pentecostal and Indigenous Shona traditions in which she was raised, illuminating the centrality of dreams, ancestors, and revelation to both belief systems. The artist merges painting and printmaking techniques to conjure worlds glimpsed in her dreams, where figures commune with spirits, and protective comforts and nightmares collide in stirring unions. Culling from an array of sources ranging from the angels and demons of medieval European devotional art to the vibrant patterns of Zimbabwean textile designs, Zvavahera constructs what the art historian Tamar Garb has described as “a unique and porous pictorial world.” For the ICA, her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Zvavahera is presenting a selection of recent paintings centered on the theme of animals, considering how they populate her work as well as the collective imagination.