Artists

Misheck Masamvu lives and works in Harare. His practice encompasses painting, drawing and sculpture. Contradiction and conflict serve as undercurrents in his paintings: an antagonism rages between abstraction and figuration as distorted figures transmute out of raging landscapes. While violent motion is depicted in the brush strokes and paintwork, there is a sense of immovability – as if the figures are trapped within torrents of painted land, caught within their own past and their own circumstance. He speaks of each painting as a proposal for a new reality, an arena for him to work through personal hopes and frustrations but also to offer alternatives, for himself and others, to the constraints and constructs of daily reality.

Masamvu has participated in many local exhibitions and international biennales including São Paulo (2016), Venice (2011), São Tome e Príncipe and Dakar. He was an invited featured artist at the 2020 Sydney Biennale, in Australia, with an exhibition of major paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Source: Goodman Galley, Johannesburg.

Image by Anthea Pokroy.