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Showing at Kettle's
Yard
TWO OPENINGS
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
I attended two previews towards the end of October 2024, Portia Zvavahera - Zvakazarurwa, at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, the work of an artist new to major shows and the international art market, from Harare, and, just up the hill at Murray Edwards College, The Women's Art Collection, Conversation Not Spectacle.
Since I was bound to be heavily outnumbered at the latter I was more than willing to engage in the conversation bit instead and had not intended to review either but when you review the spectacle of the few photographs you took, you ask: why not? The art can speak for itself as well.
Portia Zvavahera, Embraced and Protected in You, 2016, oil based printing ink and oilbar on canvas
Lace based stencil for printing on canvas
Portia Zvavahera, There is Too Much Darkness, 2023, oil based printing ink and oilbar on canvas
Some works are with lino and cardboard printing, some on linen.
The techniques of their creation are new to me but there is also economy of effort in filling in large expanse. She will not need assistants to fill in space like Rubens though she says, and it seems to apply mainly to her most recent work, that she leaves white space for God to fill in.
This might be sound. With Miró's Oiseau de la nuit [1] you get a glimpse of his technique when he leaves white space and it surely makes sense with Lifted Away.
Portia Zvavahera, Lifted Away, 2024, oil based printing ink and oilbar on linen
The problem with impromptu reviews is lighting and colour fidelity though mobile phone software updates are getting better.
The Women's Art Collection has over 600 works and Museums Accreditation by Arts Council England, with public access. This show is the result of a two year research project so I am inclined to let their text illustrate my favourite work in the show, which is on paper with an illusion of fragility.
Claudia Clare, Remembering Atefeh, 2013
Remembering Atefeh appears to tell a story of genuine fragility but it is not the only work on show employing gold.
This is a proper hoofed quadruped [2] - Elisabeth Frink, Resting Horse, 1981, lithograph
This is a living collection in a living College so restoration may not come easy but one of my favourites in the permanent display, Sophie Ryder's Black Horse, is genuinely fragile as a paper collage and looks to have suffered more damage since I saw it last, though the textured ground beneath the paper is also lovely. The Fitzwilliam's Hamilton Kerr Institute would have the skills to do it but does the possibility exist that the artist could restore it?
Sophie Ryder, Black Horse, 1989, paper collage, donated by the artist