Methods of Flight: Amanda Shingirai Mushate | Grace Nyahangare

Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Methods of Flight, a dual presentation of mixed-media paintings by Zimbabwean artists Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Grace Nyahangare, opening on 21 November 2024 (until 1 February 2025).

Born in Bulawayo in 1995, Mushate studied fine art at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Arts Studio, graduating in 2016. Working primarily in oil, her practice operates from an abstracted, self-determined realm. Amorphous strands and spectres of diaphanous colour and light merge to build layered constructions. Mushate’s overlaid linework can be read as an ever-expanding topographical mapping of this space. These meandering pathways course the complexity of Zimbabwean life. The country’s history is punctuated with colonial violence, political disruption and threadbare attempts at post-independence reform. Her abstractions navigate not only the desire lines and avenues of survival within this overwrought context, but resolutely assert the necessity of beauty.

There is no discoverable beginning or end in Mushate’s paintings. Colour negotiates the gaps between and beneath her woven lines, as if seeking fertile opportunity to bloom. A current of disobedience runs through the body of work. In their generative, unburdened lyricality, her canvases do not allow us to be small. They insist on courage and beauty as twin flames. The artist tells us that splendour exists, that joy is real, not as a destination but as a way of being.

Building on a foundation of printmaking and photography, Grace Nyahangare’s monotypes combine oil and ink. Born in Harare in 1996, she graduated from the same institution a year after Mushate. Nyahangare’s practice has been catalysed by personal experiences of pain and growth, evolving through distilled processes of memory and emotional recall. In her early 20s, Nyahangare spent three years living and working in the UAE. After the failed promise of inclusion in a local art fair, she was driven to find work as a waitress. The job proved to be a form of enslavement. Her passport was confiscated and held for ransom while she worked 14-hour days and was subjected to racism and abuse. Devising a plan of escape, she returned to Zimbabwe with a new determination to succeed as an artist, as a woman and as a young mother.

Nyahangare’s paintings render her figures against horizonless fields of colour. Her subjects are hybrid, changeable creatures. Their floating bodies present as fluid, mythic in their undulating proportions and vibrant tones of pinks, blues and yellows. Some works present several figures as shared, chimeric organisms: an arm becomes the extended limb of another, splayed fingers suddenly read as tendrils of hair. Nyahangare’s works explore the physical self as a holding site for both trauma and transcendence. Often painting with her daughter present in studio, these kinetic explorations speak wholly to personhood, but more pointedly to the terror and ecstasy of inhabiting the female body.

Like Mushate, Nyahangare’s paintings manifest from a state of rapturous potentiality. Contemporary art emerging from Zimbabwe evinces a singular energetic verve. Mushate and Nyahangare are part of a generation shaped within a cyclical state of reinvention, shedding and active reclamation. Methods of Flight facilitates a space for new visual terms and poetries.

Methods of Flight will run concurrently with two other exhibitions: Like a Fish in the Water (Terence Maluleke) and Mbare Opera (Wycliffe Mundopa).