- Fridericianum
For over two decades now, artist Portia Zvavahera, who was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, has been creating a deeply personal and emotionally charged body of work. These works draw their inspiration from dreams, spiritual experiences, and a pictorial tradition marked, amongst other things, by Zimbabwean culture as well as religious iconography. They are characterized by their use of luminous color, complex layering of figures and patterns, and their dovetailing of different techniques – one that includes block printing and gestural painting.
Her works often depict ghostly figures – sometimes isolated, sometimes in pairs or groups – captured in moments of transformation, ecstasy or inner struggle. These figures appear in richly textured compositions that blur the borders between the spiritual and the physical, the dream-like and the tangible. The force field between visibility and concealment, presence and absence lends her work extraordinarily emotional impact.
From September 27, 2025 (opening: September 26) to February 8, 2026, the Fridericianum will be hosting the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The show brings together works from between 2019 and 2024 offering a concentrated insight into Zvavahera’s practice.
The show in Kassel follows on from a string of institutional accolades bestowed upon the artist over the past few years. For instance, Portia Zvavahera has held solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston (2025), a show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (2025) previously on display at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge (2024), as well as presentations at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2024) and the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean in Port Louis (2020). In 2013, she took part in the exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs held as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. In 2022, her work featured at the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Zvavahera’s work was also presented as part of the 10th Berlin Berlinale for Contemporary Art in 2018.
The exhibition is held under the patronage of Her Excellency Alice Mashingaidze, extraordinary and plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Republic of Zimbabwe.
