Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera’s first Scottish exhibition is a beautiful exploration of dreams – and a must-see this March
Portia Zvavahera’s paintings feel like stepping into someone else’s dream. Layers of colour and pattern, figures caught between sleep and waking, a quiet kind of intensity—it all comes together in Zvakazarurwa (Revelations), the Zimbabwean artist’s first exhibition in Scotland. Opening this March at Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh, it brings together recent works alongside new pieces made especially for the show.
Born in Harare in 1985, Zvavahera works from her home studio, blending batik, printmaking, and painting to create worlds that exist somewhere between memory, spirituality, and imagination. She paints people, creatures, and shadowy forms that flicker through her dreams. The result is mesmerising—images that feel deeply personal yet universally familiar.
Curated by art historian Tamar Garb, the exhibition looks at how Zvavahera’s work has evolved, from early explorations of intimacy and emotion to the bold, flattened patterns of her recent paintings. Many of the pieces have a layered, almost textile-like quality, using repetition and dense colour to build emotional landscapes. Some feel vast, stretching across colour fields, while others pull focus on a single massed form, holding quiet tension within the canvas.
The Energy Present (2024) and Fighting Energies 2 (2024) are among the new works created for this show, continuing Zvavahera’s exploration of dreamscapes, femininity, and unseen forces. Her figures, often caught in moments of transformation, float in spaces that feel both vast and enclosed. They are works that stay with you—unfurling in your mind long after you’ve left the gallery.
Alongside the exhibition, a new publication by Tamar Garb expands on Zvavahera’s practice, featuring discussions with writers and scholars Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. If you’re interested in the thinking behind the work, there’s also a conversation event on March 1st, where Garb will be in discussion with Chiya and Gobodo-Madikizela about the themes of revelation, femininity, and transformation in Zvavahera’s work.
Zvavahera has exhibited globally, including at the Venice Biennale, Tate, and Pérez Art Museum Miami, but this will be the first time her work is shown in Scotland. If you like art that lingers—paintings that sit somewhere between the seen and the sensed—this is worth your time.
Portia Zvavahera’s Zvakazarurwa
01.03.25–25.05.25.
Free. Open daily 11am–6pm.
Fruitmarket, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF
For more details, visit fruitmarket.co.uk.
