Artists

Mostaff Muchawaya was born in 1981 in Nyazura, Manicaland, Zimbabwe and currently lives and works in Harare. He studied at Zimbabwe’s National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design from 2002 to 2003. Muchawaya’s works are mostly portraits created from remembrances of his childhood. However, the faces of his sitters are distorted and unrecognisable; reflecting the inconsistencies inherent in memories. To add to this, the artist employs a layered painting style, wherein he applies paint and, once dry, then scrapes parts of it off. He also uses household cleaning agents to change the works and adds paint chips collected from old walls or prior works.

Muchawaya held a residency at Greatmore Studios in Cape Town in 2017. The same year he held his first solo show in South Africa entitled Memory/Ndangariro at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town. In 2018, he participated in the group exhibition Five Bhobh – Painting at the End of an Era at Zeitz MOCAA and in 2020 he was featured in the 22^nd Sydney Biennale in Australia.