Gareth Nyandoro, 'Greenhouse Trellising', 2023 | Mixed Media / Paper Mounted on Canvas 300 x 230 cm / 118 1/8 x 90 1/2 in | GNY 101
Tiwani Contemporary is delighted to open our spring solo exhibition with Gareth Nyandoro: Pfumvudza. Living in Ruwa, a town 30 minutes’ drive from Harare, Nyandoro has been observing and documenting the everyday lives, and informal entrepreneurship of its residents in small to large-scale mixed-media drawings in his inimitable Kuchecka-cheka style influenced by etching techniques and paper-cutting, assemblage, and props.
The exhibition presents Nyandoro's personal engagement with the concept of pfumvudza, meaning to bloom or thrive, and the name of the 2020 Zimbabwean government-sanctioned scheme, advocating citizen self-sufficiency, to help mobilize and support families and small crop growers to implement conservation agriculture to restore, and renew the fertility of soil, to grow plots of maize, millet, and wheat to mitigate food insecurity and the decline of large-scale industrial production.
Amidst other challenges on resources such as energy and water; climate change, hyperinflation, lockdowns, and post-pandemic life, are contexts highlighted in this corpus of new and recent works, capturing working-class Zimbabweans thinking about food sustainability, urban farming, economic migration within and outside of Zimbabwe, and resilience.
In the Upper Gallery, Nyandoro's backyard projects capture him growing and harvesting vegetables such as tomatoes, and chicken rearing. Greenhouse Trellising (mixed media, paper, mounted on canvas, 2023) is rendered from a photograph of Nyandoro. Inspired by botanical illustrations, this large-scale drawing with three-dimensional forms depicts the trellised plants and their fruits to reimagine the color, texture and condition of the plant and fruit forms. Chicken Run Setup (mixed media, paper, mounted on canvas, 2023) reflects the exponential rise of small-scale poultry rearing. Pfumvudza/Maize-cob Steelers (ink, paper mounted on wood panel, 2021) depicts a grower harvesting maize.
At the juncture between the Upper and Lower Galleries is the work, Corner Glenara and Nelson Mandela Hustle (mixed media, paper, mounted on canvas, 2023), capturing the vendor activity around the intersections of Glenara and Nelson that connects the highway from Zimbabwe to Mozambique. The artist looks at the colors, forms and movement of the vendors with their goods which almost look like regalia.
In the Lower Gallery, Locked Chill (paper and ink on wood panel, 2021) and Panorama (mixed media, paper mounted on canvas, 2023) draw together the polarities of movement between the enforced pandemic lockdown restrictions to curb spreading of the coronavirus and depicts Nyandoro's Uncle who became stranded. Panorama captures a lone 'spirit' figure onboard a fishing boat looking through a telescope for a missing population - an allegory that attests to the reported 84% (Population and Housing Census, 2022, ZIMSTAT, 2023) of the population that left Zimbabwe to look for employment elsewhere.
Commerce is another focus present in the space. Here Nyandoro is influenced by the quotidian aesthetics of market-place advertisement posters being replicated on social media platforms in Chickens for Sale #1,2,3 [Call Now 0735 570829] (mixed media, paper, mounted on canvas, 2024). Zimbabwe has one of the highest interest and inflation rates in the world. The primacy and stability of the US dollar is recreated in its fragile and torn states alluding to its high-frequency usage and value in trading in iterations of We Buy Torn Dollar Notes #1,2,3 (mixed media, paper mounted on canvas, 2024).
Opening Hours
Tue - Fri: 10am to 6pm
Sat: 11am to 6pm
Location:
24 Cork Street
London, W1S 3NG
Text and pictures, copyright hauser and wirth and the artist