There are moments in contemporary African art when a single gesture becomes a lens, a way of thinking through where we have been and where we are going. Kufunga naMavara, which is Shona for To Think in Colour, feels like such a moment. Rather than positioning itself as a definitive statement on Zimbabwean painting, the exhibition opens a conceptual space: one where colour becomes a methodology, a memory and a future tense.
Presented collaboratively by Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg and First Floor Gallery Harare, the exhibition stages a transnational conversation that has long been present but seldom named. It acknowledges a region whose artistic labour, quiet insistence and uncompromising experimentation have helped define the tone of contemporary excellence globally. The dialogue between the two galleries is not merely an organisational partnership but an articulation of the deep infrastructural networks that sustain Southern African artmaking against the grain.
In Kufunga naMavara, paint appears not as a decorative surface but as a form of thinking. Across generations, Zimbabwean artists have used the medium to hold complex interior worlds, to negotiate the weight of political histories and to imagine beyond the limits imposed on them. Paint becomes a site of insistence, a material vocabulary capable of carrying both rupture and repair. It invites us to consider how, in this region, colour has never been neutral. It has held the tensions of land, the urgencies of the everyday and the quiet intimacies of life lived between constraint and possibility.
To think in colour here is also to think in lineage. Zimbabwe’s contemporary art scene has shaped the continent’s visual language for decades, even when this influence has been obscured or under-acknowledged. From the disciplined experimentations of earlier painters to the assertive materiality embraced by younger artists today, the region’s relationship to paint has been one of continuous evolution. It has produced an aesthetic clarity grounded in lived experience yet unafraid of abstraction, metaphor or risk. The global art world’s current appetite for African painting, often framed as sudden or emergent, owes much to the long and rigorous practices forged in Zimbabwe’s studios.
What this exhibition offers is a recognition of that continuum. It does not attempt to summarise a nation’s artistic imagination. Instead, it creates a pause, an opportunity to look closely at a region that has spent years defining, refining and expanding what contemporary African painting can be. The collaboration between MOMO and First Floor extends this logic, reminding us that the infrastructural conversation is as important as the artistic one. Here, institutions meet across borders, not to collapse difference but to affirm a shared investment in the cultural futures of the South.
Kufunga naMavara ultimately invites the viewer into an act of contemplation. It asks us to sit with colour as thought, to recognise the political and poetic labour carried in the medium of paint and to acknowledge Zimbabwe as a site of ongoing artistic innovation. In doing so, the exhibition becomes less about the works on the wall and more about the sensibility they reveal, a sensibility that continues to shape contemporary African art with quiet force and global consequence.