Virginia Chihota

• 19-04-2024
• Written by admin

Virginia Chihota is a contemporary artist from Zimbabwe and was born in 1983. She is currently living and working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In 2006, she received her Fine Arts degree from the Harare National art gallery in Zimbabwe. At the 55th Venice Biennale 2013, Chihota represented Zimbabwe and received the Canson Award the same year.

Her work has been offered at auction many times. The paintings of Virginia Chihota have been displayed in many exhibitions at main art galleries, such as SAVVY Contemporary and Saatchi Gallery. She has been featured in several articles for “The Art Newspaper” and the Berlin Art Link. In 2018, one artwork of her “Raising your own” was sold at $7,050 at Sotheby’s London.

Her great work on paper shows a natural, expressionistic verve and stunning beauty in the intricate use of shapes, materials, and layers, referred at once to earthly yet transcendental, filled with references to daily life and spiritual and cultural symbols. Chihota’s research illustrates the women’s movement crosses boundaries and raises questions around various forms of identity.

The work of Virginia Chihota is contemplative and profoundly influenced by everyday life. She addressed issues such as childbearing, family, child-raising, grief, religion in a conversation on love and morality. She blends printing and illustration practices to create compelling works, and the subjectivity arises as an idea embodied in concepts of inter-relationship. Her topics, in their iridescent cosmic consciousness, are an aspect of her.

These frequently reflect the feminine form convergence into almost abstraction, and faces that are trapped in odd hugs suggest a figural union, together with an interpretive repertoire that refers to the household and reinforces association and collective identity. She handles a friendship as a study to examine where she has been gone wrong.

Through Virginia Chihota’s work, she is capable of working on reactions to close relationships in an environment, among fact, and imagination. The start point, a blank piece of paper, would become a limitless universe at the beginning of a new friendship, whether sexual, theological, or professional, and using paint and ink to place constraints on it, which are always found as a bond advances.

Chihota collects and pulls her topics, like a marionette, into unpleasant and unknown empty spaces where they are susceptible and irritable. Her job encourages her to carry on a broken heart where conflicts have developed and provide her the opportunity to explore ways to overcome the traumas.

The painting from the series ‘A Thorn in my Flesh’ is discussing the equivalences between weaknesses and strengths, the thorn to be a symbol of chaos in nature. Positive and negative have always been two opposites, and neither can occur without one another and interpretation of which would assist everyone in using negative to promote the positive. The bodies are the starting point for short interactions and use them with communicative power; the colors are dominant, white, black, and red, and the patterns are both dynamic and concrete.