Impressive art to view at First Floor Gallery in Harare during the festive season

By CityLife Arts Writer

If you happen to be to be in Harare this festive season and you have time to view some art in that city you perhaps would consider visiting one of the most renowned galleries in the city First Floor Gallery. The exhibition titled Paper Weight features some of the most interesting artists in that country.

Gallery director Valerie Kabov explains what the exhibition is all about and each artist’s practice.

“”We are celebrating the end of an incredible year at the gallery, with a spectacular exhibition. Paper Weight features brand new works from seven of our artists with surprising and delightful approaches to working with the most beloved support of all artists – paper! Exploring collage, printmaking, embroidery on paper and watercolour is both accessible and conceptually sophisticate. We are thrilled to share it with you!.

”Matters of great concern should be treated lightly and Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.” Master Ittei (Book of the Samurai) In more ways than one for artists, making work on paper encapsulates this philosophy better than any other medium. Working on paper requires both enormous concentration and focus with the absolute knowledge that every gesture and movement is final and almost invariably irreversible. At the same time that very finality, requires a leap of faith and trust in one’s intuition to make such resolute marks. While paper is the first go to for artists for developing concepts and thinking through new ideas, as an independent medium it demands of the artist the master its dynamics, technical complexities, while presenting unique opportunities for expression.

Light in physical weight, works on paper are hefty in their contribution to art history and evolution of art forms, from papyruses to etchings, charcoal, water colour, photography, collage and many more. We can see much of this evolution and variety in the works in Paper Weight with each artist developing not only their unique approach in conversation with the medium but also in a way that is distinct in the context of their mainstream practice.

In many ways, working in a new medium allows the artist to express a part of their personality, which remains silent in others. Richard Butler Bowdon is perhaps the clearest example of this modality. While Richard’s painting practice stands out by his singular approach to portraiture and really strongly nuanced use of colour, his works on paper are almost entirely monochrome and stray far away from portraiture in a conventional sense. At the same time they are entirely in tune with the way Richard’s visual philosophy of describing our ideas of representation and depiction of symbols and people arises in the context of working with a copic pen and Arches paper with intrusions of photo collage and cardboard.

For Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude, paper has been a natural ally for many years, with collage especially being an easy partner for expressing immediacy of social commentary in his work and referencing daily realities of people’s lives in Harare. In many ways, it is elements of working on paper which bleed into Nyaude’s paintings, through writing and use of charcoal bringing his practice into a dynamic equilibrium between the two.

Similarly for Mavis Tauzeni, paper has been an origin and foundation of some of the skills she has then transferred to her work on canvas, having trained in printmaking and which continues to be intrinsic to her approach, but marked by intrusion of stitching which makes its way from textile into paper as the artist’s gender signifier.

This stitching into paper, as an testament to women’s labour is also picked up by Anne Zanele Mutema in a dramatically different way, working at towards expressing emotional and intellectual possibilities of vacant space delineated by minimal markings. For an artist who focuses on installation and texture in her practice, the ascetic nature of the works is an appreciation for the natural expressive ability of the blank piece of paper.

As a counterpoint to Mutema’s meditative stoicism, Miriro Mwandiambira’s works are an exuberant celebration of the very moment of being alive and having only one life to live. An artist working in installation, sound and performance, easily finds in fabric collage and small piece of paper an opportunity to build a world of sound, character, humour, sound and theatre in the most delightfully effective and efficient way.

For Simon Back efficiency of expression is also an objective but in an entirely different way. Arriving from ideas of modernism, his works make a path towards synthesizing colour, geometric minimalism with legible symbolism. Bringing together monotype with ink, charcoal and markers his works give us opportunities to travel elsewhere including the choice of destination.

Art as a destination is also a major element in the work of Helen Teede. Nuanced subtlety of water colours in Paper Weight seem to be in stark contrast to the love of texture and depth of colour in her canvases. But on better reflection it is clear that these works are equally transporting but with recognition of the physical reality of how the work made on water colour sketch pad at a table and how it is to be experienced by the viewer looking closely and not at a distance. While sharing their delighting in process, the artists in Paper Weight present us with works which allow us to be grounded in the experience of Art as an End in itself and valuing the singularity of that moment.”