Fruitmarket’s 2025 Exhibition Programme

Portia Zvavahera is emerging as one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a painting practice that combines a unique combination of techniques – painting, printing, batik – to construct a visually beguiling personal cosmology featuring figures, creatures, shapes and shadows. Working in a studio in her home in Harare, she weaves together dreams, fantasy and stories of herself and her family into densely patterned, intensely coloured, mesmerising paintings.    

This exhibition, whose title is in Shona, means ‘revelations’ and includes both new and recent paintings in order to reveal the depth and richness of Zhavahera’s practice. The focus is on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and especially Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques to register her personal visions of creatures and contexts. She creates monumental mindscapes that form ambitious decorative schema of imagined worlds and patterned palimpsests.  

The exhibition draws on her earlier engagement with eros, intimacy and female experience, in a few key works from c 2012. But the bulk of the exhibition focuses on the period from 2020 to the present when the work becomes flatter, more richly patterned and oneiric. New works have been created especially for the exhibition, and these are shown to build on recent works with shared characteristics: they emerge from dreams; they are figurative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy; they combine paint and print, drawing and painting; they use repetition and pattern; they involve massed central forms over extended colour fields.  

The exhibition is curated by Tamar Garb FBA, Durning Professor in the Department of History of Art at University College London. Garb is a recognised authority on contemporary art from Africa as well the works of women artists and feminist aesthetics. She has been in dialogue with Portia Zvavahera for approximately eight years and has already published on her in an essay on the ASIKO experimental art school that Zvavahera attended in Lagos in 2011.   

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication that extends the reach and scope of the exhibition. Written by Tamar Garb, it also includes an extraordinarily rich conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. 

This exhibition is made in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard.

British artist Mike Nelson is known for immersive, absorbing installations that transform the spaces they inhabit, transporting audiences into a world assembled by the artist from the detritus of everyday lives other than his and our own. Often referencing works of literature or countercultural or fringe political movements, his environments draw us in with their strangeness but make space for us to recognise our own lives and concerns within them too.    

Nelson has worked in Edinburgh before. In 1994, he tore Collective Gallery apart with ‘To the Memory of HP Lovecraft’ and in 2004, again with Collective, he parked ‘Pumpkin Palace’ on a derelict gap site opposite Fruitmarket. In 2008 he showed in the Fruitmarket group exhibition Print the Legend. His Untitled No.22 (High Plains Drifter) involved spray painting one of our fire escapes and the entire contents of a store cupboard with several coats of red paint to create a disorientating, breath-taking new environment. 

When we created Fruitmarket Warehouse from the fruit and vegetable warehouse turned nightclub next door, Mike Nelson was one of the artists whose material imagination we enlisted to help us think through its possibilities as a space for art. This present exhibition is created in the Warehouse, Nelson using it as both a conceptual and actual generator for the work in the exhibition galleries. Ideas are at an early stage, but the exhibition will extend throughout the building, transforming Fruitmarket and our experience of it in line with Nelson’s singular ability to imagine and create different worlds and share them with us. 

We are sad to hear of the death of groundbreaking artist, activist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.  We have been working with Jaune, her son Neal Ambrose-Smith and her gallery, Garth Greenan Gallery, towards a major exhibition of new and existing work opening at Fruitmarket in November. We have grown very fond of Jaune, and are devastated to have to continue plans for the exhibition without her, but are proud to be bringing her work to new audiences in Scotland in this exhibition that will celebrate her life, work and career-long mission to legitimise the work of contemporary Native American artists.

Artist, activist, educator and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born at the St Ignatius Mission on the Flathead reservation in western Montana, USA. She was a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation.  

Throughout a fifty-year career, Smith made art; curated exhibitions; mentored fellow artists; and delivered workshops in schools and on reservations all of which work together to bear witness to the past, present and future of Native Americans from a Native American perspective. Her paintings, prints, collages, sculptures and assemblages embody a deeply-felt hope for equality and mutual respect for land, nature and humans: ‘My work comes right from a visceral place – deep deep – as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take those feelings and attach them to the passer by? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try’.  

Smith was committed to the politics of land and land ownership and stewardship and asked questions concerning conservation and the climate crisis in and through her work. Who owns the land? Who takes care of it? This exhibition combines existing work with new work made for Fruitmarket in an exhibition that she hoped might contribute to current debates around the climate crisis and how we might hope to take steps to mitigate its harms.   

The exhibition extends over both floors of Fruitmarket’s exhibition galleries, with the lower floor presenting a selection of existing work to set the context for an expansive presentation of new work she was working on before her death earlier this year.