Striking and chromatically resplendent, Mother and Child is exemplary of Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s acclaimed painterly practice which weaves together compelling narratives and representations of black bodies in different forms. Addressing personal experiences of dislocation, displacement, and legacies of colonialism, Hwami’s tender paintings reveal a deeply personal vision of life, often featuring self-portraits and images of her immediate and extended family. Executed in 2017, the present work was exhibited that year at the artist’s critically acclaimed first solo show If you keep going South, you’ll meet yourself at Tyburn Gallery in London. Celebrating the familiar and the familial, Mother and Child reflects central themes of Hwami’s oeuvre regarding the joyfulness of childhood with its spirit of creative experimentation and freedom from boundaries and limitations. These same themes also underpin Hwami’s visual practice, often beginning with digital collage and a free interplay of image, photograph and text. Hwami views the digital stage of her process as the most creative and intuitive. She translates digitally rendered images onto large scale canvases, subtly adding painterly brushwork. The resulting compositions convey a bold mix of form and colour.

Born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993, Hwami and her family relocated to South Africa amid political turmoil when she was nine years old, and then moved to the United Kingdom at age seventeen. Experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement thus play an important role in the artist’s painterly language. While Hwami continues to draw inspiration from memory, as well as research trips to southern Africa, her painting has also been indelibly shaped by the work of artists such as Jenny Saville, Henry Taylor, Kerry James Marshall and Michael Armitage during her studies in England. The 2017 Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Tate Modern in particular had a profound impact on the artist. A year earlier in 2016, Hwami graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts in London with a Bachelor of Replica Handbags s and in 2022 received her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. Since then, the artist has seen a meteoric rise and recognition within a relatively short period. In 2019, Hwami became the youngest person to represent their country at the Venice Biennale when she showed at the Zimbabwe Pavilion, returning again in 2022 to the 59^th Venice Biennale as part of The Milk of Dreams exhibition, curated by Cecilia Alemani. In 2021, Hwami’s work was included in the exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery in London and had her first solo When You Need Letters for Your Skin at Vicroria Miro which now represents the artist. Today Hwami’s work is held in public collects ions including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town.