By Stephen Garan'anga
First Floor Gallery (FFG) in Harare has fast become the new kid on the block in the Harare metropolitan fine art circles with their monthly art exhibitions. They have become very popular with artists, attracting new audiences each time there is a show opening.
Their exhibiting space has now proved on a couple of occasions to be too small to accommodate their capacity crowds from all walks of life attending the official openings.
Their current show tilted "Maungira" (echoes) that opened its doors to the public on June 30, 2011 had audiences spilling into the corridors, smothering every square inch of space available.

Viewing and communicating with artworks is becoming haste before you consider others to have their chance in the crowded tiny gallery. Soon rather than later FFG needs to secure an alternative space for their openings if they are to harness the current intrigue. First Floor Gallery (FFG) has secured a sizable grant from the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust that will enable them to see off a couple of more monthly shows.

They long to have some business transactions through their artistic endeavours to nurture what they have already rolling. After all they have just had a very successful first ever international art export show in Paris, France, titled "Harare Paris! Young, contemporary and Zimbabwean" that took place in May 2011.

"Maungira", the theme of the current offerings from three upcoming artists was mercilessly exploited by the former National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art Studios students. Clive Mukucha, Kura Maponga and Sky Salanje had no difficulties what so ever when exploring the theme they attacked in various media.

Clive Mukucha shows a lot of flexibility as he expressed himself imposingly in both two and three dimensional media. His ultimate power of expressiveness seems to be in his sculptural work in which he had an outstanding piece of creativity titled "Intoxicated".

He portrayed in representational abstract a drunkard man holding an automobile fan probably as his source of intoxication in a well wire woven left hand wearing a black and white striped Chinese sweater.
The "Intoxicated" puts on a red and black scotched three quarter pants leaving created black and white socks well exposed then disappear into brown and black shoes.

His big eared metallic square face wearing huge black framed spectacles reflecting various things in vicinity has a spiraling down electric cord attached to a small medical drug bottle hanging upside down from the shoulder of the left arm. The mastery execution of the sculpture hung on the wall entails the undisputed bright light that reflects at the end of the tunnel for the impressive artist.

On the other hand Kura Maponga is fascinated by baby clothes in hanging constructions. He too has joined the scavenging found objects movement wagon that seems unstoppable at the moment.
On "Chegotsi", Kura black painted a round metallic double handled food bowl that he connected to a black coat hanger, hanging a 50 grey two year old baby sweater exposing the red and white inside of its

monkey hat. The piece truly resembles a back view of a big headed baby, hence the title "Chegotsi".
In another similar piece portraying the frontal of another big headed baby titled "Scare Them", Maponga picked an ancient yellow pot covered by a spherical big black plastic handled lid that he scratched off some

old paint to create baby features.
He then glued somebody's hair and put another red lid on top, creating a beautiful hat. The rest of the half body is covered in a dirty blue baby sweater hung on a black coat hanger connected from the yellow pot.

Not to be out done is the work by Sky Salanje who preferred oils on paper to bring out various facial expressions of native Africans in an attempt to bring back painting as we have known it.

• Stephen Garan'anga is an international fine art practitioner, independent art projects coordinator, chairperson of AfricanColours Artists, executive member Batapata International Artists' Workshop, critical visual arts writer amongst other things. garananga@gmail.com