Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude

Born in 1988 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe
Born and raised in Mbare, Harare and Zimbabwe’s most vibrant and notorious ghetto, Nyaude works against the sweeping identity, which has been defined for Zimbabweans by the voice of the state and domestic and international media. His images oscillated between figuration, abstraction and hallucination, drawing from the restless energy of his neighbourhood and its youth, in a country, where more than 70% of the population is under the age of 30. Living on the edge between survival and chaos has been a call to poetry, swinging between brutal and sentimental but almost invariably cynical and satirical. His gesturally rendered effigies of traditional proverbs and poignant vernacular idioms, defy characterisation other than the bursting drive to attain human dignity and quality of life that frequently appears beyond the reach of dreams. Nyaude’s work has achieved wide international critical and collector recognition, in 2018 he presented a major body of work in the USA as part of Songs for Sabotage at the New Museum Triennial. Nyaude’s workis in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden (Macaal), Rubell Family Collection, Jorge Perez personal collection and numerous notable private collections.
Recent exhibitions
2022: Ziva Munhu Wako, First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2022: Negotiating Chaos: It’s the way it shatters that matters (Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude and Pebofatso Mokoena), Simone Subal Gallery, New York City, NY, USA
2022: The Joys of Self-Delusion, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai
2021: Premonition of Civil Peace, Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis
2021: Grey Spaces, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2020: True Optimism (solo), Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China
2019: Poetry of Rebels, Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude/Song Yuanuyan, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, China
2019: Day and Night (Gresham Tapiwa Nyude and Wycliffe Mundopa), GNYP Gallery, Berlin
2019: Night and Day (Gresham Tapiwa Nyude and Wycliffe Mundopa), First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare
Wycliffe Mundopa

Born 1987 in Rusape, Zimbabwe.
Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe
Wycliffe Mundopa is Zimbabwe’s leading painter and a passionate advocate for the lives of society’s most vulnerable, whose needs and dreams are often swept under the carpet by the powers that be. The pathos and pageantry of his works, also becomes an opportunity to see how painfully and vibrantly women’s lives reflect the conflicts of tradition and change of life in contemporary life in Zimbabwe. And avid student of the history of painting, Mundopa makes an urgent case for importance of presenting life of his country and his contemporaries with the same pathos and grandeur as the Dutch masters like Rubens and Rembrandt while situating himself as an heir to the grand tradition, Europeans jealously protect. For him, the drama of the lives of the ordinary people of Harare is of truly historic significance and should be honoured as such. More than that at a time when there is a renewed drive for exoticisation and selfexoticisation in African art, Wycliffe Mundopa pushes back with harsh honesty and brutal beauty of his figures.
Mundopa’s talent has attracted both critical attention and collector acclaim internationally since his early twenties with works in collections as far and wide as Norway, Thailand, Cameroon, USA, Hong Kong, Nigeria, France, Israel Australia, Kenya, Netherlands as well as South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Recent Exhibitions
2023: Frieze London, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
2023: Pachipamwe (We Meet Again), Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2022: Echo curated by Serubiri Moses, Jenkins Johnson Projects, New York, USA
2021: Zva_nyadza: FNB Art Joburg Prize, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
2020: 1001 Afternoons, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK
2019: Kubatana – African Contemporary Art Survey, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway
2019: Night & Day – Wycliffe Mundopa/Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude,First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2019: Harare Fauves (Mundopa, Nyaude, Teedе), Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel
2018: Defying the narrative, Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco, USA
2017: Another Antipodes/urban axis, PS Art Space, Fremantle, Australia
Grace Nyahangare

Born 1996 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Grace Nyahangare is a young painter, who is building up her practice on a foundation of printmaking and photography, which inform both the technical and intellectual elements of her work. Her dreamlike, surreal and dynamically passionate canvases are the result of passing through numerous metamorphoses starting as observations and photographs which are then made into monotypes which then acquire a new environment on canvases in which paint is also transformed through interaction with printers ink to yield a poignancy and otherworldliness. In her early twenties Grace spent three years living and working in the UAE, which has impacted both her aesthetic and ideas about self as a person but also as a woman and now as a young mother. Detachment, reflection and recomposition are synergistic with the ideas that Grace has been working with from the earliest stages of her evolution as an artist, and trying to find whole in a space of cultural and relationship otherness. Grace joined First Floor Gallery Harare in 2023, after completing a three month residency in 2022 and is currently working towards her first solo exhibition.
Selected Exhibitions
2023: Upcoming - Solo, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare
2022: Helen Leiros Legacy Exhibition, Nhaka Gallery
2022: Tribute Exhibition, Skalanje and the wailers studio Chitungwiza Nhimbe Studio
2021: Chizvino zvino Exhibition Alliance Franchise de Harare
2020: Artists in the stream X, Gallery Delta
2019: State of Mind exhibition, Gallery Delta
2019: Engaging The 45th Year exhibition, Gallery Delta
2019: Women’s Exhibition, National Gallery of Zimbabwe
2019: Beyond Township walls, National Gallery of Zimbabwe
Grace Cross

Born in Harare, Zimbabwe 1988
Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
Grace Cross graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016 and holds a Bachelor of Honors in English Literature from the University of Cape Town and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, for which she was awarded the Judy Steiner painting prize. She has had five solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows both locally and internationally. She has works in the collections of Africa First, the Spier Arts Trust and the University of Cape Town among others. She is a grant recipient from the National Arts Council of South Africa and from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A Cross is a material painter who reflects the psychic and physical weight that women carry with them; raising awareness about motherhood, home, and feminist historiographies. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent between continents; she was brought up in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, India and the USA. Her cultural transmission across national boundaries informs her painting practice today, where she excavates, and pays tribute to, feminist lineages of knowledge and knowledge production by interrogating histories, unearthing women’s stories and exposing their continued erasure. Cross lives and works in Cape Town as a practicing mother and artist.
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