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). The exhibition platforms the artists’ distinct visual languages, each emerging from the exploration of self and art-making to reimagine modes of being from within a complex socio-political fabric. 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. Image: Grace Nyahangare "Pandora's box" ____ Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Mbare Opera, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Zimbabwean artist Wycliffe Mundopa, opening on 21 November, 2024. The exhibition brings together major works produced over the past several years, articulating the spectrum of the painter’s prolific visual vocabulary. Focusing on the symbolic value of images and their contextual references to the sub-culture of Harare’s notorious high-density neighbourhood, Mbare, Mundopa has developed theatrical and idiomatic narratives about life in Zimbabwe. Mundopa’s rhapsodic paintings are populated with an ensemble of women and children. Multiple bodies are presented within immense canvases of Fauvist colour. Dressed in carnivalesque attire – striped stockings, polka-dot dresses, farcical buckled heels – these figures occupy a Bacchanalian version of reality replete with the revelry, erotic agency and hedonism synonymous with Dionysian myth. Mundopa renders Harare’s most vulnerable social factions – women and children – with a liberated hand. His use of non-objective form and lurid flashes of abstraction and absurdity disrupts our perception of these bodies, agitating the prejudices embedded in our ways of seeing. Within Mundopa’s practice, the personal and political coalesce. Behind the flux and vibrancy of our initial reading of his work, the politics of representation hums at the core. Pathos and satire take center-stage in this body of work. Mundopa’s personages enter and exit the frame, each with their own characterisation, building densely layered storytelling that immerses us in a world both scintillating and disturbing. His pictorial language is laden with the symbolic use of animal imagery: crocodiles, life-size frogs, technicolour fish and dogs are all recurring characters. These do not function merely as visual devices, but as manifestations of colloquial expressions that are part of a vital urban sub-culture on Mbare’s streets. This vernacular encodes grassroots criticisms of the broader social ills and grievances of the country’s societal fabric. The artist’s employment of the human form suggests an amplified consciousness of the body as a corporeal instrument for pain, rest, expression and desire. For his subjects, the experience of pleasure becomes a ritual act of defiance. These figures assert claim to gratification, indulging in all the earthly delights canonically associated with the painting traditions of the West. In System and Dialectics of Art, John Graham proposed, “The purpose of art in general is to reveal the truth and to reveal the given object or event; to establish a link between humanity and the unknown; to create new values; to put humanity face to face with a new event, a new marvel.” The essential role of the artist lies in this process of metabolising, distilling, abstracting and magnifying the vast experience of the world around them. Mundopa’s paintings hold a mirror to the unravelling of contemporary Zimbabwean life and the wider disarray and moral relativism of our post-capitalist era. He makes no judgement of this debasement. Within his liberated tableaux, there is a sustained joy and affirmation of both humankind’s fragility and resilient changeability. Art is not a space for linearity and didactics. Mundopa creates a realm where agency is afforded to all those involved: himself as the artist, his subjects and his audience – whoever they may be. ____ Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Like a Fish in the Water, a solo exhibition by South African artist Terence Maluleke, opening on 21 November, 2024 (until 1 February, 2025). Marking his first solo exhibition in the US, this series of new paintings is a vivid development of Maluleke’s personal and religious symbology, exploring themes of self- determination, community, ritual and artistic freedom. Like a Fish in the Water is a reckoning with his faith and expression of the desire for a life inscribed with agency and meaning. A visual storyteller whose pictorial language marries a graphic sensibility with elements of traditional figuration, Maluleke draws heavily on motifs from both Christian theology and indigenous African spirituality in this body of work. A golden halo that could also be read as a crown of thorns features prominently in many of the paintings, alongside copies of the Bible, a blue candle that his church gave to him as a child and various timber sculptures of fish. Alongside the association with Jesus and the miraculous catching of fish in the Gospels, the latter is deployed in homage to the visionary South African sculptor Jackson Hlungwani, with whom Maluleke shares a deep spiritual and artistic connection. The two artists are of Tsonga heritage and trace their origins to nearby villages in Limpopo province. Maluleke’s father was baptised by Hlungwani and he visited the late sculptor’s studio and compound as a child. The revered artist and pastor gave Maluleke’s family a large wooden carving of a fish, a subject he portrayed prolifically throughout his life as a representation of abundance, life and harmony between humans and nature. As a tribute to Hlungwani, Maluleke titled this body of work after the sculptor’s habitual reply when asked by arriving guests how he was: “Like a fish in the water,” he would respond. In the starkness of their rendition, focus on foreground action against a flat background, and narrative impact, the works in this exhibition are reminiscent of traditional iconographic paintings. Maluleke’s palette is more subdued than earlier paintings, with a prevalence of golden/mustard hues, enlivened with an experimental approach to mark-making and inclusion of unconventional materials such as glitter. In contrast to the didacticism of religious art, however, he injects his own individual point of view and an ambiguous approach to meaning. He has cultivated a vocabulary of forms with personal significance that recur throughout his oeuvre – including calla lilies, which he describes as communicating the push and pull between strength and fragility; portraits of his sister Nozipho, whom he regards as an extension of himself; and the ‘lêkê’ plastic jelly sandal, which featured heavily in his first solo exhibition at Southern Guild, Grace in Grand-Bassam. All of these appear in this latest body of work alongside religious symbols and objects of contemporary relevance (including a VR headset), establishing the primacy and power of one’s own unique mythology in building a life of meaning. Blue Dance depicts a crowd of worshippers clad in the blue and white uniforms of the Apostolic and African Zionist churches, surrounding a haloed figure. Inspired by the memory of physical energy experienced at a recent church service, the work transmutes the rhythmical pattern of colour and shape into movement and sound. The person in the middle, says Maluleke, is “the guider and the light”. He is intentionally depicted as an anchoring presence, grounded in his own centre, but the congregants are harder to read: they are moving in their own directions and it is not clear if they are attracted to or repelled from him. A painting of a red-roofed house with a halo hovering above it also invites multiple readings. The work envisions the artist’s lifelong dream to build his own home – a place of refuge and warmth, blessed by divine intervention. The building in this work is intact but the paint drips down from its walls and windows, as if the structure is dissolving. Is the promise of sacred protection forsaken? Maluleke offers an alternative interpretation: “I like the idea of human fallibility and emotional dissolution living together with faith. Even when we are at our lowest, rather than close ourselves off from shame, we can still go to God.” Birth, death, sacrifice, transcendence – Maluleke depicts the arc of human struggle and contemplates the pursuit of purpose and connection. His faith encompasses the creation of his own cosmology free from the strictures of doctrine and the confines of Western conceptions of formalised religion. His artistic practice is a pilgrimage of sorts, an insistence on the redemptive power of the imagination and a dreaming into being of his highest ideals.