Misheck Masamvu

Monkey Bars, 2023

Misheck Masamvu is widely recognised as a leading voice within a new generation of contemporary Zimbabwean painters. Trained in Germany, he continues to live and work in Zimbabwe, drawing deeply from the country’s complex social, political, and emotional landscape. This context serves as a vital source for his gestural, expressionist approach to painting.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Masamvu uses painting as a space to rethink, rework, and reimagine the world and our relationship to it. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become central to his visual language, allowing him to explore structures of power and the ways in which history shapes the present. While earlier works grappled with the need to confront inherited pasts and develop tools for navigating the present, recent paintings – such as ‘Monkey Bars’ – embrace a more fluid interplay between past, present, and future. For Masamvu, this evolving perspective acknowledges history as memory, recognising that the traces we carry inform how we interpret and move through the world.