First Floor Gallery Harare
www.firstfloorgalleryharare.com
Zva_nyadza - Joburg Art Gallery
For his first solo exhibition with Johannesburg Art Gallery, Wycliffe Mundopa is presenting a brand new body of work, dedicated to the memory of his mother. A suite of more than fifteen monumental new canvases elevating and celebrating the drama and exaltation of the lives of Zimbabwe’s extraordinary, ordinary women, who are the beating heart of the country.
To bear witness….
The crucial thing to understand about Wycliffe Mundopa’s practice is that he is a witness. This may be difficult to fathom at first glance given the euphoric and metaphoric transpositions saturating his canvases. Mundopa challenges us to feel truth through seeing, knowing that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Contemporary painting is saturated with literality in which interpretation is frequently by conceptual design or an ex post facto rationalisation. With photography and photomanipulation overwhelming the field of figuration the value of the painter speaking to a direct lived experience has been deprioritiesed. Mundopa’s lifeblood is invested in speaking otherwise. Bearing witness is different to seeing, watching or observing. Bearing witness means taking on and sharing the heartbeat of those you are with. At it is core it is empathy and empathy means embracing complexity, which cannot be reduced to neat platitudes and binaries of superimposed intellectual discourse de jour. Very early in his life and his art career Mundopa opted to remain in Zimbabwe, at a time when many were fleeing the country’s economic and political traumas, fully conscious of the very personal sacrifices this choice would claim but equally certain of his responsibility to do so.
For Mundopa the intimate, the personal and the vulnerable is deeply political. The large compositions use the mode of genre painting to create multiple narratives which critique the policies and the politics in his country and beyond, which neglect those most in need. There is anger in the beauty and beauty in the pain in these works.
Unapologetically, women have been the relentless and overwhelming inspiration for Mundopa’s practice. In Zva_nyadza he is honouring his mother’s fate as the first woman but also the fate of all women of Zimbabwe who thrive in the unlivable, are fierce and beautiful, resilient and courageous enough to claim joy and happiness, despite what life and the world dishes out to them. Women who can be muses, mothers, lovers and friends. Women who are not saints but who carry the sanctity of their culture and country’s conscious in their limbs, lips and loves.
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.
Valerie Kabov
©2021
www.firstfloorgalleryharare.com
Zva_nyadza - Joburg Art Gallery
For his first solo exhibition with Johannesburg Art Gallery, Wycliffe Mundopa is presenting a brand new body of work, dedicated to the memory of his mother. A suite of more than fifteen monumental new canvases elevating and celebrating the drama and exaltation of the lives of Zimbabwe’s extraordinary, ordinary women, who are the beating heart of the country.
To bear witness….
The crucial thing to understand about Wycliffe Mundopa’s practice is that he is a witness. This may be difficult to fathom at first glance given the euphoric and metaphoric transpositions saturating his canvases. Mundopa challenges us to feel truth through seeing, knowing that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Contemporary painting is saturated with literality in which interpretation is frequently by conceptual design or an ex post facto rationalisation. With photography and photomanipulation overwhelming the field of figuration the value of the painter speaking to a direct lived experience has been deprioritiesed. Mundopa’s lifeblood is invested in speaking otherwise. Bearing witness is different to seeing, watching or observing. Bearing witness means taking on and sharing the heartbeat of those you are with. At it is core it is empathy and empathy means embracing complexity, which cannot be reduced to neat platitudes and binaries of superimposed intellectual discourse de jour. Very early in his life and his art career Mundopa opted to remain in Zimbabwe, at a time when many were fleeing the country’s economic and political traumas, fully conscious of the very personal sacrifices this choice would claim but equally certain of his responsibility to do so.
For Mundopa the intimate, the personal and the vulnerable is deeply political. The large compositions use the mode of genre painting to create multiple narratives which critique the policies and the politics in his country and beyond, which neglect those most in need. There is anger in the beauty and beauty in the pain in these works.
Unapologetically, women have been the relentless and overwhelming inspiration for Mundopa’s practice. In Zva_nyadza he is honouring his mother’s fate as the first woman but also the fate of all women of Zimbabwe who thrive in the unlivable, are fierce and beautiful, resilient and courageous enough to claim joy and happiness, despite what life and the world dishes out to them. Women who can be muses, mothers, lovers and friends. Women who are not saints but who carry the sanctity of their culture and country’s conscious in their limbs, lips and loves.
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.
Valerie Kabov
©2021
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