Goodman Gallery presents, Talk to me while I’m eating, an exhibition of abstract colour-rich paintings alongside figurative pencil drawings by pioneering Zimbabwean artist Misheck Masamvu.
Talk to me while I’m eating marks Masamvu’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, bringing a selection of never before exhibited works produced in Harare during 2020 in which the artist continues to unpack the human condition in relation to the natural world.
Masamvu’s brushstrokes exist as remnants of the physical action of painting in which multiple temporalities are included in a single image with several layers of imagery beneath the surface. The outcome is a porous pictorial space, one that moves between representational clarity and abstract abundance.
Masamvu’s multidisciplinary practice explores the socio-political setting of post-independence Zimbabwe. His work draws attention to the impact of economic policies that sustain political turmoil and raises questions around what it means to preserve a state of being with dignity. Central to his painting practice is a strategic approach to combining abstraction and figuration through which the artist considers a possible language for redemptive space:
"I use figuration and abstraction in my work because I am looking for an alternative space – one that is against the forced ideology of government and the breakdown of the pursuit of humanity. For this, the symbolism of the landscape and the figure in constant states of entangled metamorphosis are important. I am aware of the communion of the body, the soil and spirit and am interested in how transfiguration and memoirs of body and soul can evoke a real sense of vulnerability” – Masamvu.
Across Masamvu’s oeuvre, figures appear within abstracted landscapes into which they seem to be amalgamating. This process of assimilation into the land symbolises the return to nature and a releasing of the shackles of the forced ideology of governance and control. In renegotiating our relationship to land - seeing it not as something to be owned, but as a spiritual place in which to live in symbiosis - Masamvu suggests ways in which we might, as artist and curator Brook Andrew states, “resolve, heal, dismember and imagine futures of transformation for re-setting the world.”
For Zimbabwe-based artist and curator Georgina Maxim, Talk to me while I’m eating is the culmination of twenty years in which Masamvu has developed a distinct visual grammar and covertly alludes to persisting censorship in Zimbabwe:
"Despite the fact that Masamvu refuses to acknowledge being a political artist, there are incidents where he has been unable to turn a blind eye and to simply ‘witness the consequence’. These feelings and frustrations towards the ‘remnants of old behaviour’ from those in ‘power’ has given birth to works like, Whispers in the Mist where these misdeeds must be confronted, challenged and made visible.”
As Masamvu writes in the poem that accompanies this exhibition:
The question is
How much appetite do I still have?
To draw inspiration from the past
Or do I still feel empowered by ticking the checklist?
Without paying heed to the consequences that may fall?
Maxim describes Masamvu’s recent mindset for creating as operating within a “war space” in which “not once did he back down”. In this latest body of work, she perceives that “the picture planes are filled with struggle […] There is an organised chaos to the paintings where they initially appear to go in many different directions, but still confined to the perimeters of each canvas. And yet, something my eyes constantly return to are the figures in Masamvu’s works – these subjects that best allow him to express, interpret and read the moments around him. From the repetition of these figures to the hanging feet, and even the words deeply embedded within the brushstrokes of the oil, the paintings in their complexity take ownership” – Maxim.
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s (b. 1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe) works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. As one of the most significant artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers a renewed understanding of visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become a prominent language for Masamvu to explore structures of power and how history comes to bear on the contemporary moment, but also how one can adapt to a new way of interacting with the world.
Selected solo exhibitions: 'Show me how ruins make a home,' A Gentil Carioca, São Paulo (2024); 'Exit Wounds,' Goodman Gallery, New York (2024); 'Safety Pin,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2023); 'Pivot,' Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Brussels (2023); 'Talk to me while I’m eating,' Goodman
Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2021); 'Hata,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2019); 'Still Still,' Goodman Gallery, Cape Town; 'Misheck Masamvu,' Institut Français, Paris, France (2015); 'Disputed Seats,' Influx Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2009).
Notable group exhibitions include: 'Kuvhunura/Kupinda nemwenje mudziva,' Fondation Blachere Bonnieux, France (2024); 'Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics,' The Institutum, Singapore (2024); 'Inside Out,' Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva (2022); 'Witness: Afro Perspectives,' El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020); 'Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection,' Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2020); 'Two Together,' Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2020); 'Five Bobh: Painting at the End of an Era,' Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2017); 'Africa 2.0 > is there a Contemporary African art?,' Influx Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2010); 'Art, Migration and Identity,' Africa Museum, Arnhem (2008); and 696, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2008).
Major international exhibitions include: 'The ‘t’ is silent,' 8th Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2022); 'STILL ALIVE,' 5th Aichi Triennale, Aichi, Japan (2022), NIRIN , 22nd Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2020); 'Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty),' the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) and his international debut at Zimbabwe’s inaugural Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
Collections include: A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town, South Africa); Braunsfelder Family Collection (Cologne, Germany); Uieshema Collection (Tokyo, Japan); Perez Art Museum (Miami, USA); Pigozzi Collection (Geneva, Switzerland); Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo, Japan); Fukutake Foundation (Auckland, New Zealand); COMMA Foundation (Damme, Belgium); ANA Collection (Lagos, Nigeria); Sigg Art Foundation, Le Castellet, France; Fondation Gandur pour l’Art (Geneva, Switzerland); and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Cape Town, South Africa).
Masamvu lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.
