Sekuru Koni

KUDZANAI-VIOLET HWAMI (B. 1993)

Sekuru Koni

signed and dated 'Hwami 2017' (on the reverse)

acrylic and oil on canvas

23 5/8 x 23 5/8 inches (60 x 60 cm)

framed: 25 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches (65.4 x 65.4 cm)

Executed in 2017.

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Florida

EXHIBITED:

London, Tyburn Gallery, If You Keep Going South You'll Meet Yourself, September-November, 2017.

NOTES:  

Born in 1993 in Gutu, Zimbabwe, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami is a contemporary painter whose psychologically charged portraits and dreamlike figurative compositions explore memory, migration, identity, and diasporic experience. Raised in Zimbabwe before moving to South Africa and later the United Kingdom, Hwami draws upon personal archives, family photographs, and imagined spaces to construct paintings that move fluidly between autobiography and collective history. Her works are characterized by expressive brushwork, layered surfaces, and emotionally resonant palettes that dissolve distinctions between portraiture, memory, and fantasy. Through this deeply intuitive approach, Hwami creates figures that feel suspended between presence and recollection, intimacy and distance.

Executed in 2017, Sekuru Koni reflects the artist’s early exploration of familial memory and psychological portraiture. The title, using the Shona word “Sekuru,” meaning grandfather or elder, immediately situates the work within a framework of kinship, ancestry, and personal history. Rendered in acrylic and oil on canvas, the composition possesses the atmospheric softness and emotional ambiguity that have become hallmarks of Hwami’s practice. The figure emerges through layered passages of color and gesture, occupying a space that feels simultaneously physical and remembered.

Hwami’s paintings often resist fixed narrative, allowing emotional tone and painterly surface to carry the psychological weight of the work. In Sekuru Koni, areas of loose abstraction coexist with moments of carefully articulated form, producing a sense of intimacy shaped as much by absence as by depiction. The restrained square format intensifies the immediacy of the portrait, drawing attention to the quiet emotional exchange between sitter and viewer. Like much of Hwami’s work, the painting functions not simply as representation, but as an act of recollection and reconstruction through paint.

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.