ART CITIES:Rome-Portia Zvavahera
In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions that manifest from other realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione Memmo Archive
For “Like Flowers We Fade” Portia Zvavahera’s first institutional exhibition in Italy, the artist presents a site-specific installation conceived especially for the Foundation’s spaces, together with a new body of paintings developed following a period of residency in Rome. The project marks a significant phase in the artist’s recent research, in which autobiographical experience intertwines with a broader reflection on memory, loss, and transcendence.
Zvavahera’s work gives form to emotions emerging from realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vibrant, visionary imagery is rooted in the fundamental conditions of earthly existence – life and death, love and loss – translating intimate experiences into layered pictorial environments. These visions take shape through surfaces built by accumulation, combining expressive brushwork, intense layers of colour, and complex printmaking techniques to generate dense and pulsating visual fields.
For her first solo exhibition in Rome, the artist focuses on an intimate and meditative theme: the passing of her grandmother, an experience that continues to resurface in her dreams, alongside reflections on heaven and the way its imagined presence guides life on earth, interweaving with the joys and anxieties of everyday experience. Within this framework, dreams, with their symbolic and emotional stratifications, remain a fundamental generative matrix. Technically, this vision translates into a free and experimental practice that integrates drawing, gestural painting, and printing. Through vibrant chromatic layering, Zvavahera overlays complex patterns and figures in a calibrated interplay of transparency and opacity, using hand-cut stencils and repeated motifs to generate a rhythmic tension that lends depth, density, and movement to the pictorial surface.
Deeply rooted in Shona culture and language – a Bantu language spoken primarily in Zimbabwe by approximately 80% of the population, and the sphere in which the artist thinks, dreams, and defines her identity – her practice merges religious iconography with psychological inquiry, transforming the artwork into a space of revelation. Here the dream assumes the role of a privileged channel of communication with the divine and an almost prophetic guide: visions, omens, and memories are internalised and reworked until they become painterly matter. The creative process is therefore intrinsically processual and cathartic, aimed at transferring the intensity of inner experience onto the surface. The resulting works are populated by spectral figures caught in states of ecstasy, metamorphosis, or emotional tension, in a language that dissolves the boundaries between the tangible and the spiritual.
Photo: Portia Zvavahera, Like Flowers We Fade, Installation view Fondazione Memmo-Rome, 2026, Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Memmo
Info: Curator: Alessio Antoniolli, Fondazione Memmo, via della Fontanella di Borghese 56/B, Rome, Italy, Duration: 29/4-1/11/2026, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 1:00-18:00, https://fondazionememmo.it/
