Art reviews: Portia Zvavahera | Jerwood Survey III

Inspired by her dreams, Portia Zvavahera’s work stands out not only for its intensity and scale but also for its unusual style, writes Susan Mansfield

Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa, Fruitmarket Gallery ★★★★

Jerwood Survey III, Collective Gallery ★★★

Sometimes stepping into an exhibition can be a bit like stepping into an artist’s mind. Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera paints her inner world, which seems to be a place of intense stand-offs between primal fears for her safety and the safety of her family and the protection offered by her Christian faith.

In her large-scale figurative paintings, the artist paints herself menaced by malevolent animals: rats, bulls and, on one memorable occasion, owls. She prostrates herself in prayer and is attended by angels. That the paintings are inspired by her dreams gives them a particular rawness and immediacy.

Zvavahera, who trained in Zimbabwe where she still lives, was in the Central Pavillion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and is now represented by David Zwirner. Her paintings are hot property. This touring exhibition, which comes to the Fruitmarket from Kettles Yard in Cambridge, is her first major institution show in the UK covering 12 years of work, and is curated by Tamar Garb, an expert in women’s and African art.

Her work stands out, not only for its intensity and scale but for its unusual style. Zvavahera trained in printmaking and now paints using oil-based printing inks, building up layers of expressive colour and printing on to it using materials like lace and palm fronds. Her works are often densely patterned.

Fallen People by Portia Zvavahera | Portia Zvavahera / Fruitmarket

The early pieces explore elements of personal experience, particularly pregnancy, which was clearly traumatic for her. In one painting, she appears as a bride, almost vanishing into an overwhelming white dress. Another, I Want to Stay in Love, is about the struggles of early marriage, the male and female figures either grappling or embracing, the woman veiled, half-disappearing into the picture plane.

In There’s Too Much Darkness (2023), two rats threaten her while she lies supine and heavily pregnant. A protective angel kneels at her head, while nearby four women kneel in prayer. This piece is the hinge between the earlier work in the downstairs gallery and the new work upstairs where there are more rats and more angels, and a surprising triumphant work called Lifted Away, in which the artist appears to lift her family to safety in the air on vast angelic wings.

It would be easy to exoticise, and clearly Zvavahera draws deeply on Shona language (her mother tongue) and some aspects of Shona culture and myth. But her process is more sophisticated than it might first appear, taking cognisance of movements in both Western and African art. Even the dream imagery is not simply translated into paint, she processes it, sometimes emerging with a different narrative. What’s crucial is harnessing the dream’s emotional energy.

The exhibition title translates as Revelations but, for all its drama, it’s a slow burn, a slow reveal. I can’t be sure how literally I should be reading these pictures, or whether to look at them through an African lens or through the Western context of Freud, Jung and the Surrealists. I’m not even sure I’m reading them right: I thought her depiction of the Labour Ward was nightmarish, but apparently she found solidarity there among the other women.

But there’s no mistaking the emotional force of these paintings, or the fact that Zvavahera knows exactly what she wants to do with them and has found the expressive language which enables her to do so. That much is clear, and might be the reason why the art world is beating a path to her door. In a decade obsessed with authenticity, she is the real deal.

Installation view of Marvi and the Churail by Aqsa Arif, part of Jerwood Survey III at Collective, Edinburgh | Eoin Carey

There is nothing in Jerwood Survey III, which has just arrived at Collective, which packs a punch like this. The touring show features new commissions by ten early-career artists from across the UK, aiming to provide a snapshot of current concerns and approaches. The artists taking part were nominated for the show by established contemporary artists.

It may be that young people today are fielding more issues than any previous generation. You could go round this show ticking them off: the environment, the legacies of colonialism and enslavement, feminism, gender, queer issues, displacement, diaspora, AI. And they are committed to engaging with them in their work, which is good. Or is it?

Take Kandace Siobhan Walker’s film installation Dreamerism, an 18-minute film which “reflects on urban and rural environments, medieval esoteric traditions, futurology, Afro-Atlantic-Indigenous spiritualities, ecology”, oh, and indigenous land rights and climate crisis. It’s shown in a recreated bedroom, and no one would blame you for wanting a lie down after that much content. The film is rather ponderous, but how could it not be?

Or take Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh’s installation exploring “inherited memories, ecological decline, chronic illness and the legacy of colonialism”. Intriguing links are made between stomach surgery, Irish myth and a brown trout with a rare digestive system. There are objects made of glass and ceramics, and complex diagrams which might be explaining the links - via horses ears and zebra mussels - but I’m none the wiser.

In Paul Nataraj’s work, nine record players play vinyl recordings of a BBC radio programme from 1981, but the records have been covered with earth-dyed calico, so the sound is abstract and percussive. I believe it’s about cultural appropriation and the mystical number 108, but that’s as far as I got.

Installation view of work by Philippa Brown atJerwood Survey III, Collective, Edinburgh | Eoin Carey

Philippa Brown’s sculptural piece is an architectural wooden frame festooned with objects, claiming to reference utopian artist communes, nostalgic subcultures and the occult, but you can’t see the wood for the trees. Glasgow-based Alliyah Enyo has made archaeological objects which look like they’ve been retrieved from the sea, along with a 20-minute soundtrack, but how are the two working together?

Another Glasgow artist, Aqsa Arif, has a strong central idea for her two-channel film, Marvi and the Churail, exploring two female archetypes from South Asian folk culture and gradually bringing them together. She’s also built an impressive installation in which to watch it.

And in the end, I rather warmed to Sam Kellan’s durational film of a man in bed with a human-sized hot water bottle. Having thought it slight at first, when I’d seen the rest of the work I was quite relieved that someone was prepared to take a single idea and run with it, and it manages to say something about the universal human need for warmth and companionship.

As snapshots go, I suspect Jerwood Survey III does capture quite a lot about emerging contemporary art: its diversity and seriousness, its tendency to take on too many issues at once, and to forget the importance, at the end of day, of presenting something visually impactful. Perhaps it’s a lesson that comes with age: that less is often more, and sometimes it’s better just to pick a horse and run with it.

Portia Zvavahera until 25 May; Jerwood Survey III until 4 May.