Born in 1995 in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe
At just twenty-seven, Mushate is establishing herself as a leading voice in contemporary Zimbabwean painting and an innovative young abstractionist with a growing international reputation. As a young woman and a new mother, in a male dominated field Mushate is also a role model and an advocate for women artists, making art and careers possible without sacrificing family. After completing her studies at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts Studio in 2016, Mushate was mentored by Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude to develop a vibrant and unique personal vision and modes of expression, presenting her first solo exhibition in 2018 with First Floor Gallery. Like any young person, Mushate is preoccupied with finding and shaping her place and path in this world, while negotiating the complexity of interpersonal relationships. Drawing her inspiration from music and from people around her but not wanting to be constrained by over figuration, she paints and sculpts her happiness and burdens, and the things that she takes time to visualize. “Art is a way for me to write about a ‘future’ for me and for all individuals for them to never be overshadowed by negative influences that divert us to our true purpose in life.” Mushate’s passionate, playful and mazelike canvases have been winning critical and international collector attention globally with works in important private collections in Cape Town, New York, Harare, London, Amsterdam and Paris.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Only what is revealed can be known (Group Exhibition), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: FNB Art Joburg, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa
2023: Rudo Rwunouya Nemabasa with Tashinga Majiri, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Latitudes Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa
2023: Art Dubai, First Floor Gallery Harare, Dubai, UAE
2022: Paris Internationale, First Floor Gallery Harare, Paris, France
2022: SCENORAMA (Gabi Ngcobo curator), Javett Art Centre - University of Pretoria, South Africa
2022: Shuviro Yamai, solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2021: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2021: Nguve ine Muridzi, solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery, Harare, Zimbabwe
Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe
At just twenty-seven, Mushate is establishing herself as a leading voice in contemporary Zimbabwean painting and an innovative young abstractionist with a growing international reputation. As a young woman and a new mother, in a male dominated field Mushate is also a role model and an advocate for women artists, making art and careers possible without sacrificing family. After completing her studies at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts Studio in 2016, Mushate was mentored by Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude to develop a vibrant and unique personal vision and modes of expression, presenting her first solo exhibition in 2018 with First Floor Gallery. Like any young person, Mushate is preoccupied with finding and shaping her place and path in this world, while negotiating the complexity of interpersonal relationships. Drawing her inspiration from music and from people around her but not wanting to be constrained by over figuration, she paints and sculpts her happiness and burdens, and the things that she takes time to visualize. “Art is a way for me to write about a ‘future’ for me and for all individuals for them to never be overshadowed by negative influences that divert us to our true purpose in life.” Mushate’s passionate, playful and mazelike canvases have been winning critical and international collector attention globally with works in important private collections in Cape Town, New York, Harare, London, Amsterdam and Paris.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Only what is revealed can be known (Group Exhibition), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: FNB Art Joburg, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa
2023: Rudo Rwunouya Nemabasa with Tashinga Majiri, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Latitudes Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Johannesburg, South Africa
2023: Art Dubai, First Floor Gallery Harare, Dubai, UAE
2022: Paris Internationale, First Floor Gallery Harare, Paris, France
2022: SCENORAMA (Gabi Ngcobo curator), Javett Art Centre - University of Pretoria, South Africa
2022: Shuviro Yamai, solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2021: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2021: Nguve ine Muridzi, solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery, Harare, Zimbabwe
Born 1993, Ekurhuleni, South Africa. Lives and works, Johannesburg, South Africa
Mokoena holds a BA Honours in Fine Art (with distinction)from Wits University and is completing a Master of Arts in Fine Arts at Witwatersrand University. In 2014, He completed his N.Dip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg and subsequently, apart from working towards his BTech qualification, Pebofatso taught drawing and presentation at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at UJ. Emerging from early practice in printmaking, Mokoena’s painting practice is formally underscored by precise mark making and division of space, while exploring ideas around micro and macro scales of politics, architecture and the environment.
Pebofatso’s work has received early recognition and support, locally and internationally. Mokoena has held multiple solo exhibitions including; Neoclassical Taste Matrix and Space Dot Conundrums in Harare, Zimbabwe, The Pebofatso Experience at HZRD and Inside Jobs at the Bag Factory as well as curated exhibitions including Diptych; Disclosure at SMAC; Fresh Produce 2014, Inner Nature, Fortunes Remixed, and South African Voices: A New Generation of Printmakers in Washington DC and is in the Springs Art Library Collection, the South African Embassy Art Collection (in Washington, D.C.), and the JP Morgan Global Collection amongst other private collections.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: Space Dot Conundrums, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2023: Latitudes Art Fair - Johannesburg, South Africa
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
2021: I Draw Therefore I Think, South South online. First Floor Gallery Harare
2021: Neoclassical Taste Matrix, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
Mokoena holds a BA Honours in Fine Art (with distinction)from Wits University and is completing a Master of Arts in Fine Arts at Witwatersrand University. In 2014, He completed his N.Dip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg and subsequently, apart from working towards his BTech qualification, Pebofatso taught drawing and presentation at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at UJ. Emerging from early practice in printmaking, Mokoena’s painting practice is formally underscored by precise mark making and division of space, while exploring ideas around micro and macro scales of politics, architecture and the environment.
Pebofatso’s work has received early recognition and support, locally and internationally. Mokoena has held multiple solo exhibitions including; Neoclassical Taste Matrix and Space Dot Conundrums in Harare, Zimbabwe, The Pebofatso Experience at HZRD and Inside Jobs at the Bag Factory as well as curated exhibitions including Diptych; Disclosure at SMAC; Fresh Produce 2014, Inner Nature, Fortunes Remixed, and South African Voices: A New Generation of Printmakers in Washington DC and is in the Springs Art Library Collection, the South African Embassy Art Collection (in Washington, D.C.), and the JP Morgan Global Collection amongst other private collections.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: Space Dot Conundrums, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2023: Latitudes Art Fair - Johannesburg, South Africa
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
2021: I Draw Therefore I Think, South South online. First Floor Gallery Harare
2021: Neoclassical Taste Matrix, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
Born 1982 in Mutoko, Zimbabwe. Lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe
Like many of my peers Harare I trained at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art Studio, which I completed in 2009 specialising in printmaking and painting, and which continue to be my main media.
Working on canvas and on paper, my goal as an artist is to make work inviting viewers to be immersed in the unsettling stillness of introspection and waters that run deep. My work is deeply personal with imagery, which oscillates between the surreal, futuristic and dreamy. While figuration floats in and out of my work, I treat it conceptually rather than representationally. Despite intimacy and other worldliness, it is nonetheless a social commentary, speaking implicitly and explicitly to the difficulties of being a woman and a woman artist with an independent and individual journey. Although I am speaking to the realities of my life in Zimbabwe, I hope and believe that the sentiments engendered in my work are immediately empathetic, not only to women but to all of us yearning to break out of convention and social expectation. While I am deeply conscious of feminism and gender in my work, my practice is broader than the issues generally addressed in gender activist art. I firmly believe that the idea that being a contemporary artist means does not mean a break with all traditional values. In my practice I assert the right to be a woman on my own terms and those terms include respect for family and tradition, the right to demand intimacy, privacy where they are needed and to speak softly when I want to. And while it has in some ways meant sacrifices in the speed of career progression, it has unequivocally meant not sacrificing my integrity and personal values.
My work has been selected to take part in National Gallery of Zimbabwe Annual exhibition in 2014 and 2015, I have taken part in Women speak out group exhibition at Fondation Blachère Arts Centre Apt (Christine Eyene, curator), in 2017 my work was included Another Antipodes/urban axix, PS Art Space, Fremantle, Australia. In 2022 I presented a solo project as part of Tomorrow’s Today curated section at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair as well as a solo exhibition at Chinatown Taylor’s in Los Angeles. My work is in the Fondation Blachère as well as Rubell Family Collection among others.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Only what is revealed can be known (Group Exhibition), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Paper Weight (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Free Spirit (with Grace Nyahangare and Simhle Plaatjies), Oop Lagos, Milik, Lagos, Nigeria
2023: It is Reality! solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2022: Pachedu (Among Ourselves), Half Gallery, New York, United States
2022: Chinatown Taylor’s: Vaanhingirkii (You can’t remember but you won’t forget) , Los Angeles, United States
2022: Tomorrows/Today (solo), Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town
Like many of my peers Harare I trained at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art Studio, which I completed in 2009 specialising in printmaking and painting, and which continue to be my main media.
Working on canvas and on paper, my goal as an artist is to make work inviting viewers to be immersed in the unsettling stillness of introspection and waters that run deep. My work is deeply personal with imagery, which oscillates between the surreal, futuristic and dreamy. While figuration floats in and out of my work, I treat it conceptually rather than representationally. Despite intimacy and other worldliness, it is nonetheless a social commentary, speaking implicitly and explicitly to the difficulties of being a woman and a woman artist with an independent and individual journey. Although I am speaking to the realities of my life in Zimbabwe, I hope and believe that the sentiments engendered in my work are immediately empathetic, not only to women but to all of us yearning to break out of convention and social expectation. While I am deeply conscious of feminism and gender in my work, my practice is broader than the issues generally addressed in gender activist art. I firmly believe that the idea that being a contemporary artist means does not mean a break with all traditional values. In my practice I assert the right to be a woman on my own terms and those terms include respect for family and tradition, the right to demand intimacy, privacy where they are needed and to speak softly when I want to. And while it has in some ways meant sacrifices in the speed of career progression, it has unequivocally meant not sacrificing my integrity and personal values.
My work has been selected to take part in National Gallery of Zimbabwe Annual exhibition in 2014 and 2015, I have taken part in Women speak out group exhibition at Fondation Blachère Arts Centre Apt (Christine Eyene, curator), in 2017 my work was included Another Antipodes/urban axix, PS Art Space, Fremantle, Australia. In 2022 I presented a solo project as part of Tomorrow’s Today curated section at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair as well as a solo exhibition at Chinatown Taylor’s in Los Angeles. My work is in the Fondation Blachère as well as Rubell Family Collection among others.
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Only what is revealed can be known (Group Exhibition), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Paper Weight (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Free Spirit (with Grace Nyahangare and Simhle Plaatjies), Oop Lagos, Milik, Lagos, Nigeria
2023: It is Reality! solo exhibition, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2022: Pachedu (Among Ourselves), Half Gallery, New York, United States
2022: Chinatown Taylor’s: Vaanhingirkii (You can’t remember but you won’t forget) , Los Angeles, United States
2022: Tomorrows/Today (solo), Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town
Born 1977 Hwange, Zimbabwe. Lives and works in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
Shamilla Aasha is a practicing artist and teacher of art and design. After many years of working in painting and mixed media, in 2018 Aasha re-engage with her love of textiles through exploration of her multi-cultural background as a Shona and Indian woman living in Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. Developing complex works addressing issues related to merging cultures and traditional practices and how they influence identity, spirituality and social status for herself and other women in her community.
Aasha’s works defy attempts at categorisation, incorporating weaving, tapestry as well as engaging with the idea and history of painting. They emerge as soft sculptures, wall-hangings made from found objects as well abstract embroideries. She describes them as sacred objects, a fitting metaphor for her narratives. This metaphor is further expanded on, as she uses sewing patterns, fabric and stitching. This process allows her to create new patterns from the old and with each layer creating a palmistry language.
Shamilla has participated in numerous exhibitions locally regionally and internationally. She is currently part of an ongoing, regional collaborative project, which is interrogating the participation of women in land redistribution in Southern Africa.
In addition to artistic practice, Shamilla also continues to nurture creativity minds through her trust-Asha Children’s Trust, an organisation devoted to creating safe spaces for young creatives grow and thrive outside the formal education sector.
Recent Exhibitions
2023: Artissima, First Floor Gallery Harare, Turin, Italy
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2023: Tomorrows/Today (solo), Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2022: Artissima, First Floor Gallery Harare, Turin, Italy
2021: I Draw Therefore I Think, South South online. First Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe
2021: Breathing Time, Solo exhibition. First Floor Gallery, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Shamilla Aasha is a practicing artist and teacher of art and design. After many years of working in painting and mixed media, in 2018 Aasha re-engage with her love of textiles through exploration of her multi-cultural background as a Shona and Indian woman living in Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. Developing complex works addressing issues related to merging cultures and traditional practices and how they influence identity, spirituality and social status for herself and other women in her community.
Aasha’s works defy attempts at categorisation, incorporating weaving, tapestry as well as engaging with the idea and history of painting. They emerge as soft sculptures, wall-hangings made from found objects as well abstract embroideries. She describes them as sacred objects, a fitting metaphor for her narratives. This metaphor is further expanded on, as she uses sewing patterns, fabric and stitching. This process allows her to create new patterns from the old and with each layer creating a palmistry language.
Shamilla has participated in numerous exhibitions locally regionally and internationally. She is currently part of an ongoing, regional collaborative project, which is interrogating the participation of women in land redistribution in Southern Africa.
In addition to artistic practice, Shamilla also continues to nurture creativity minds through her trust-Asha Children’s Trust, an organisation devoted to creating safe spaces for young creatives grow and thrive outside the formal education sector.
Recent Exhibitions
2023: Artissima, First Floor Gallery Harare, Turin, Italy
2023: Messe Messe (Group Exhibition), First Floor Gallery Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
2023: Tomorrows/Today (solo), Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2022: Artissima, First Floor Gallery Harare, Turin, Italy
2021: I Draw Therefore I Think, South South online. First Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe
2021: Breathing Time, Solo exhibition. First Floor Gallery, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Born 1996 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 she had her first solo in 2023 titled 'Hatikanganwe Asi Tinopora'
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: Free Spirit (with Mavis Tauzeni and Simhle Plaatjies), Oop Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria
2023: Hatikanganwe Asi Tinopora, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2022: Helen Leiros Legacy Exhibition, Nhaka Gallery
2022: Tribute Exhibition, Sky Salanje and the wailers studio Chitungwiza Nhimbe Studio
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 she had her first solo in 2023 titled 'Hatikanganwe Asi Tinopora'
Recent Exhibitions
2024: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2023: Free Spirit (with Mavis Tauzeni and Simhle Plaatjies), Oop Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria
2023: Hatikanganwe Asi Tinopora, First Floor Gallery Harare, Harare, Zimbabwe
2023: Investec Cape Town Art Fair, First Floor Gallery Harare, Cape Town, South Africa
2022: Helen Leiros Legacy Exhibition, Nhaka Gallery
2022: Tribute Exhibition, Sky Salanje and the wailers studio Chitungwiza Nhimbe Studio
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