Gareth Nyandoro He is an artist born in Zimbabue, in 1982, who lives and works in Harare, from where he has reached a certain international recognition. With a work centered on papercut into strips and ride on wooden boards, … Construct with them interesting and colorful panels and facilities. He currently focuses his attention on Harare’s commercial life and his street vendors.
Thus paints the carrillos of fruit merchants, also emulates advertising posters of mechanics and carpenters, and even sometimes reconstructs parodic tenderetes, of which locks, toothbrushes, innumerable combs, cheap jewelry, chucheías and razor leaves.
Unlike other contemporary African artists who have achieved international visibility, Nyandoro’s work It does not have the character of complaint nor of parody of postcolonial reality.
Zimbabue was one Old Portuguese colonybased on gold mining and slave traffic, which at the end of the 19th century became British colony, under the imperialist expansion of Cecil Rhodes, white supremacist and merchant of South African diamonds, which imposed its name to the territory, and that It went through that to be called rhodesia. With the communist guerrillas, directed by Robert Mugabe, the country reached independence and changed its name for that of the Republic of Zimbabue.
Miserias and virtues
The lands and mines of the whites were expropriated, free schooling was imposed and much advanced in health. However, there was a massive flight of capital and international economic isolation that brought with it a hyperinflation, which plunged the country into ruin, authoritarianism and corruption. Since then, Barter was imposed and a subsistence commercial economy which still characterizes Harare’s colorist life.
Nyandoro then presents himself as a kind of realistic artist who, using a certain sense of humor, portrays the local life of his country, with all his miseries and virtues. Unlike the British Yinka Shonibarewhose work focuses on the contradictions of the colonial system, and with which he has coincided in some exhibition, Nyandoro Enjoy parody more than sarcasm.
Gareth Nyandoro
‘Townshop / Township’. NF Gallery. Madrid. C/ Blanca de Navarra, 12. Until April 11. Three stars
In 2017 he presented at the Tokyo Palais from Paris An individual exhibition in which, the same as now, focused his attention on local merchants and their streets, then represented by the ‘Bouquinistes’ of Sena. Social realism, then, not exempt from irony, who is able to portray a street seller, with his carillo overflowing with yellow fruits, with an annexed poster that puts ‘ten bananas for a dollar’.
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