Fondazione Memmo inaugurates the first institutional exhibition in Italy by Portia Zvavahera, curated by Alessio Antoniolli, scheduled from Wednesday, April 29 to Sunday, November 1, 2026.

For the occasion, Zvavahera presents a site-specific installation specially conceived for the spaces of the Foundation and a new body of paintings, developed following a residency period in Rome. The project represents a significant phase of the artist's recent research, where the autobiographical dimension intertwines with a broader reflection on memory, loss, and transcendence.

In her works, Zvavahera gives shape to emotions that emerge from realms and dimensions beyond the domains of daily life and thought. Her images, vibrant and visionary, delve into the cornerstones of earthly existence - life and death, love and loss - translating intimate experiences into layered pictorial scenarios. These visions take form through surfaces built up through accumulation: the artist combines expressive brushstrokes, intense color passages, and complex printing techniques to generate dense and pulsating visual fields.

For her first solo exhibition in Rome, the artist focuses her investigation on a particularly intimate and meditative thematic core linked to the passing of her grandmother: an experience that continues to resurface in dreamlike forms, along with the idea of paradise and how her imagination guides earthly life, intertwining with the joys and anxieties of daily life. In this perspective, the dream, with its symbolic and emotional layers, remains a fundamental generative matrix.

On a technical level, this vision translates into a free and experimental practice that integrates drawing, gestural painting, and woodcut printing. Through a vibrant chromatic layering, Zvavahera superimposes complex patterns and figures in a calibrated play of transparencies and opacities, using hand-cut stencils and repeated motifs to generate a rhythmic tension that gives the painted surfaces depth, density, and movement.