Eve on an apple bottom

KUDZANAI-VIOLET HWAMI (B. 1993)

Eve on an apple bottom

oil on paper

78 1/4 x 60 1/2 inches (198.8 x 153.7 cm)

framed: 83 1/2 x 64 1/2 inches (212 x 164 cm)

Executed in 2016.

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Florida

EXHIBITED:  

Brooklyn, Tyburn Gallery, 1:54 Contemporary Africa Art Fair, May 2017.

NOTES:  

Born in 1993 in Gutu, Zimbabwe, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is a contemporary painter whose evocative figurative works explore themes of migration, memory, sexuality, and diasporic identity. Having lived between Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, Hwami draws upon personal photographs, imagined scenes, and fragments of autobiography to construct psychologically layered compositions that blur the boundaries between intimacy and mythology. Her paintings are distinguished by expressive brushwork, fluid figuration, and richly atmospheric surfaces through which bodies emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure. Across her practice, Hwami treats painting as a space of emotional excavation, using gesture and color to navigate the complexities of selfhood, belonging, and desire.

Executed in 2016, Eve on an apple bottom belongs to an important early period in Hwami’s practice, in which the artist began developing the sensuous and emotionally charged visual language for which she has become widely recognized. Rendered in oil on paper, the work combines monumentality with remarkable vulnerability, presenting the figure through loose passages of paint that oscillate between clarity and abstraction. The title invokes layered associations with femininity, temptation, sexuality, and biblical archetype, while simultaneously grounding the work within contemporary cultural language and bodily presence.

Hwami’s treatment of the figure resists fixed definition, allowing forms to emerge gradually through gestural marks, stains, and translucent layers of oil. The result is a composition that feels suspended between dream and memory, where the body functions not simply as subject but as an unstable site of projection, longing, and transformation. Despite the work’s large scale, there is an extraordinary intimacy to its surface, as though the painting records an internal emotional state rather than a fully resolved image. This tension between monumentality and fragility remains central to Hwami’s practice and contributes to the singular emotional resonance of her work.

Hwami has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Kunstinstituut Melly and major gallery presentations with Victoria Miro in London and New York. Her work is held in prominent institutional collections including the Tate in London and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she is widely recognized as one of the leading voices in contemporary diasporic figuration.