Misheck MasamvuStars are Exit Wounds, 2024
‘Stars are Exit Wounds’ reflects the core concerns of Misheck Masamvu’s painting practice, where gesture, material, and abstraction become tools for psychological and political inquiry. The work embodies his layered, intuitive approach to mark-making, where paint is not only applied but wrestled with, leaving behind a surface that feels at once wounded and luminous. Here, the act of painting is both a process of excavation and of construction capturing the tension between rupture and resilience.
The title suggests a poetics of aftermath, where beauty and pain occupy the same space. In this work, Masamvu draws attention to the visible and invisible scars that mark both body and landscape. The composition resists linear narrative, unfolding instead through dense, expressive gestures that evoke the fractured rhythms of memory, conflict, and recovery. As in much of his practice, identity is not fixed but in motion – emerging through layers that both reveal and obscure.‘Stars are Exit Wounds’ invites reflection on the instability of perception and the complexity of inner life.
