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Peter Musami

Stephen Garan’anga Visual Arts
KooVha Gallery of 146 Enterprise Road, Highlands, in Harare seems to have developed a knack for providing a platform to débutante solo art exhibitionists.

The latest comes in the wake of the recent opening of their fourth debut solo show of their last five exhibitions and the third consecutive one in 2015. Currently they are hosting “We Are Not Alone” by upcoming Peter Musami, an abstract expressionist and colourist, narrating the beauty of hope in a Zimbabwean context.

He brings in a detailed touch on how we are always protected by our native traditional spirits and how we now prefer going against them for the ever evolving ones of the modern life.

Debut solo art exhibitions are an important part of KooVha Gallery’s artist development mandate, even though they have done numerous group shows before according to Jimmy Saruchera, the director of the young art space.

“Often artists get accustomed to submitting single works to various group exhibitions. Without solos, it is possible for the same works ‘kupferwa’ into different exhibition themes at different gallery spaces.

“This breeds artistic laziness, a reduction in creativity and productivity.

“The performance pressure and scrutiny that comes with doing a solo means that artists have to produce new work, they have to think more profoundly about how their work speaks to and is in harmony with the solo’s theme. Where an artist really work it shows and the audience can sense it.

“Where a solo is weaker and the artists have not really pushed themselves far enough, the audience can feel it and there is no diluting that with the strength of the work from other artists, you stand or fall on your quality and the ability to stretch that quality across an entire gallery,” he said.

Saruchera, who also curates the shows at gallery added: “Apart from the performance pressure, a solo brings additional responsibilities, which include liaising with attendees, being able to articulate your perspective as an artist to media, collectors and the public.

“It also involves being more involved in the practical preparation of the show including thinking more about the titles, hanging work and sometimes accepting difficult decisions in terms of what work is not strong enough to show.

“A lot of upcoming artists want to do a solo, but they are often surprised at how it is to fill a gallery space on their own without any obvious point of weakness. There are solos I have been delighted with, however in all case debut solo artists come out of it having grown artistically and individually, and that is thoroughly satisfying.”

Solo exhibitions often bring a period of sleepless nights for the artist and a bundle of nerves on the official opening especially for débutantes, but Peter Musami looked as calm as still waters of the winter.

It never showed that his heart was racing at a hundred and twenty five miles per hour as he was so willing to give an insight in words about his work to the audiences.

Only when I asked him about how his preparations for the milestone show went did he reveal what was bottled inside.

His work has evolved since his graduation from the National Gallery of Zimbabwe’s School of Visual Arts and Design a couple of years ago. His abstract painting is also about his use of paint, about giving paint its reign, allowing paint to be part of the process of painting, to almost have its own ideas about what it wants to do and where it wants to go.

Abstract painting strips naked a person of orthodox ideas about painting, it is about “stage effect”, it is about theatre, it is about, in a sense, performance. For the abstract painter, the world boils down to the painter and the paint, no more, no less.

His fairly sized canvases in oils are full of texture created by the wide use of scraped off drying paints from the palates and tins he uses, making sure that nothing is put to waste. He allows his colours to dribble into each other, providing the viewer with the pleasure to enjoy colour as well as rough and bumpy patched surfaces. His featured work include “Breadwinner”, “Eye-ambrio”, “Good Egg Bad Egg”, “Mother And Child II”, “Nharirire”, “Nyarai”, “One Eyed Spirit”, “One Moon One Sun”, “The Watcher”, “Hwange”, “Hold The Line”, “Glenview Extension” and the series of “We Are Not Alone” to mention some. If most things equal, a promising future lies ahead of Musami’s art career presuming he continues on a remarkable path like the one he kicked off with.