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young and upcoming contemporary artists who never seize to amaze when it comes to creativity.
They have the nerve and conviction to uphold the international success and excellence of execution reputation that the country’s modern art has been riding on long before donkeys permanently shed their horns.
These have since been threads of inspiration invested in today’s young art practitioners who undoubtedly are highly alert that dismounting is not an option.
First Floor Gallery continues to make crucial little steps in the positive direction on the Zimbabwean fine art scene by organising a three-man mixed media exhibition of dizzy heights by some of the dynamic multi talented young contemporary artists.
An exhibition was officially opened on 31 March 2011 at the gallery on George Silundika Avenue in the heart of the city centre, Harare, featuring artworks by National Arts Merit Award winner Z. Magasa, the director of the First Floor Gallery and multi award winner M. Takadiwa and Banda.
The show has the bringing together of established media in daring ways, the striving for effect, the evolution of entirely new mediums for art.
The close trio continues to show new stretches of creative imagination as their work has become a matter of invention and the processing of ideas.
The ideas are based on artists’ new spiritual bearings than art as an outcome of social observation.
The continual use of glass, plastics and metal dominate the body of the constructional work that has been regulated in size by the limited exhibiting space.
Moffat Takadiwa continues to relish on melting glass, reshaping glass bottles and strangling them, making unorthodox mixtures to give them a new lease of life.
Panels of dead wood, strips of discarded rubber, degenerated pieces of clothes and all sorts make him feel at the King’s table.
Banda feels more relaxed at acrylic painted imagery in semi abstraction on canvas while Zacharaha Magasa is unforgiving when it comes to welded steel sculptures.
Weldart is Magasa’s premier medium that has seen him scooping important national awards though in the current exhibition seems to be equally comfortable too in the use of plastics and metal sheets in his hanging constructions.
The future of the young artists looks bright if they continue to open new avenues of creativity.
The organisers of the show, First Floor Gallery, is a young critical art space in an old colonial building that came about by the will of struggling artists to enforce a break-through in the art world.
It was also meant to be heard, allow what is in to rise to the surface, what is felt to be revealed.
Like most vibrant art spaces elsewhere in the world white elephants, old dilapidated buildings, cheap down-town apartments and unoccupied spaces have largely become artists’ creativity territories, attracting art lovers, collectors, gallerists, dealers and conscious everybody from various pockets of the earth.
Founded by young and upcoming artists assisted by a female Russian born Australian artist based in France Valerie Kabov, First Floor Gallery has hosted numerous art exhibitions with surprising attendance’s graced with fairly handsome sales which have eluded most of the established galleries.
The location of the gallery is highly strategic, targeting the shear volumes of human traffic in the building, exposing art to numerous people including those who are totally ignorant about the subject.