Artist Abstract:
Thomas Mukarobgwa (1924–1999, Zimbabwe) was a foundational figure of Zimbabwean modernism, working across painting and sculpture with an imagination informed by storytelling, spiritual belief and the natural world. His paintings, characterized by densely layered colour and animated compositions, move freely between human, animal and spiritual forms. In Untitled (1995), figures emerge and overlap within a richly coloured landscape, suggesting a world in which the visible and invisible coexist.

Four paintings by Thomas Mu entered MoMA's collection in 1963. More than six decades later, his work will return to the museum in a 2027 exhibition curated by Smooth Nzewi.
Portia Zvavahera (b. 1985, Zimbabwe) is known for expressive compositions exploring dreams, spirituality and personal experience. Drawing on prayer, dreams and visions, she approaches painting as a means of moving between physical and spiritual worlds. In You Can't Take My Hands [2] (2015), a solitary figure emerges through layers of gestural marks, translucent textures and saturated colour, evoking the emotional intensity and ambiguity of a dream state. Her practice also carries forward a dialogue with an earlier generation of Zimbabwean modernists, particularly Thomas Mukarobgwa, whom she has cited as an early influence.

Zvavahera's work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and is held in collections including Tate and Zeitz MOCAA.
Decebal Scriba (b. 1944, Romania) belongs to the first generation of Romanian artists to develop a sustained conceptual practice during the 1970s. Working across photography, performance, drawing and text, he examines language, gesture and communication, often in response to the ideological constraints of life under Romania's communist dictatorship.

In The Mask #01 (1974), Scriba uses his own body to stage a simple but charged encounter with restriction and concealment. The mask becomes both a physical intervention and a metaphor for the pressures placed on individual expression, particularly that of artists and intellectuals under authoritarian rule. Through such economical gestures, Scriba transformed the body into a site for testing the limits between private experience, artistic expression and political control.

Today Scriba is recognised as one of the key figures in Romanian conceptual art, whose work demonstrates that under conditions of political constraint, artistic freedom often survives not through confrontation, but through the continual reinvention of the conditions through which communication becomes possible.
Andrei Nițu (b. 2000, Romania) is an emerging Romanian painter whose practice examines identity, perception and the psychological mechanisms of representation. His paintings consider how images can validate, distort and project fragments of the self, exposing the vulnerabilities that emerge between subject and viewer. In Dirty Linen (2026), Nițu treats painting as a performative medium, using his distinctive figurative language to explore the intersection of ego, trauma and ideology.

Based between Amsterdam and Bucharest, Nițu graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2023. His work has been exhibited at Museum MORE in the Netherlands and with Galerie Ron Mandos and Stigter Van Doesburg in Amsterdam. Later his year he will present his first solo exhibition with Catinca Tabacaru. He is shortlisted for the 2026 Piket Kunstprijzen.