Wycliffe Mundopa and Southern Guild Gallery present ‘Mbare Opera’, a collection of major works produced over the past several years, articulating the spectrum of Mundopa’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 such as striped stockings, polka-dot dresses and farcical buckled heels, these figures occupy a Bacchanalian version of reality. Mundopa’s use of non-objective form and lurid flashes of abstraction and absurdity disrupts our perception of women and children, 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. 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. His work shows a sustained joy and affirmation of both humankind’s fragility and resilient changeability. ‘Mbare Opera’ opened on the 21st of November 2024 and will run until the 1st of February 2024 at Southern Guild Los Angeles.
