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Lot 3
KUDZANAI-VIOLET HWAMI (B. 1993)
Study for Boy in Chair
Closed30 March 2021
Estimate
GBP 4,000–6,000
More Information
Specialist note
Painted in 2016, Study for Boy in Chair is an intimate nude portrait by Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. The artist, who was born in Zimbabwe in 1993, spent much of her youth in South Africa before moving to the UK; her works are polyvocal reflections on diaspora, rootedness, and her own complex identity as a black, lesbian and Shona woman – her birth country’s majority ethnic group. She represented Zimbabwe at the Venice Biennale of 2019, before mounting her first institutional solo exhibition at London’s Gasworks in September of the same year.
Hwami works with photography and collage – both digital and analogue – to compose her boldly-coloured paintings. Drawing from a mixture of family archives, her own photographs and images sourced from the internet, she explores how selfhood might inhere in different strands of ancestral, familial and cross-cultural influence. In the present work she depicts a nude man in lithe, monochrome brushstrokes, adorned with yellow horns that lend an intriguing air of magic. Study for Boy in Chair seems to transpose different realms in multiple exposure: the subject is overlaid with an orange vessel collaged with the word ‘orange’ and holding tangles of bright colour.
Hwami has spoken of her fondness for small paintings: she finds parallels in their scale between the privacy of domestic photo albums and the publicity of social media or image-sharing sites, where we scroll through broadcasted personas in the window of a phone screen. Brought to life in Hwami’s lucid, tactile paintwork, works like the present invite sensual engagement while retaining a fundamental, self-contained mystery. ‘Being a black body’, the artist has said, ‘there’s a sense that politics will follow you wherever you go … but how can I escape that for just a little while, and carve my own ideas about the world, carve my own identity?’ (K-V. Hwami, ‘Interview with Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: (15,952km) via Trans-Sahara Hwy N1’, Gasworks, https://vimeo.com/363574399).
Hwami works with photography and collage – both digital and analogue – to compose her boldly-coloured paintings. Drawing from a mixture of family archives, her own photographs and images sourced from the internet, she explores how selfhood might inhere in different strands of ancestral, familial and cross-cultural influence. In the present work she depicts a nude man in lithe, monochrome brushstrokes, adorned with yellow horns that lend an intriguing air of magic. Study for Boy in Chair seems to transpose different realms in multiple exposure: the subject is overlaid with an orange vessel collaged with the word ‘orange’ and holding tangles of bright colour.
Hwami has spoken of her fondness for small paintings: she finds parallels in their scale between the privacy of domestic photo albums and the publicity of social media or image-sharing sites, where we scroll through broadcasted personas in the window of a phone screen. Brought to life in Hwami’s lucid, tactile paintwork, works like the present invite sensual engagement while retaining a fundamental, self-contained mystery. ‘Being a black body’, the artist has said, ‘there’s a sense that politics will follow you wherever you go … but how can I escape that for just a little while, and carve my own ideas about the world, carve my own identity?’ (K-V. Hwami, ‘Interview with Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: (15,952km) via Trans-Sahara Hwy N1’, Gasworks, https://vimeo.com/363574399).