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Mozambique: Nelsa Guambe opens solo exhibition in Maputo
10:11 CAT | 14 Feb 2025
Photo: Fundação Fernando Leite Couto
The Fernando Leite Couto Foundation (FFLC) opened its 2025 cultural season this Wednesday with a solo exhibition by Nelsa Guambe entitled “Memórias Daqui” [“Memories from Here”].
The FFLC highlights that Nelsa Guambe continues to engage with Mozambique through her refined technique and sensitivity, penetrating the deepest depths of the human soul and looking at others as she sees herself. What this exhibition, titled, not by chance, “Memories from Here”, reveals is her desire to interpret people and the society around her, through drawing and painting, suggesting other images beyond what is actually seen.
“In her portraits of women with huge, dazzling eyes, Nelsa seeks to find, in each gaze, the ideal place to create fantastic and exciting fantasies,” reads the curatorial note. “These women are like a repertoire of feelings, thoughts and particular moods. Nelsa uses her art to explore the multiplicity of female identity. In the portraits she creates, there is a fusion between the personal and the universal, where each face reflects traits of its own essence, but also of the diversity that makes up the feminine.”
“As if she were trying to give another meaning to life, while listening to and interpreting the anguish, the dream, the desire, the illness and the cure, the vanities, the simplicities, but also the mystery and the transfiguration of the landscape where the beings are placed.”
The Couto Foundation’s visual arts curator Yolanda Couto says Guambe’s work “invites the observer to contemplate the complexity of the feminine appearance, which is not limited to fixed or controllable stereotypes”.
“Instead, this feminine identity emerges as fluid, dynamic and surprising, especially for those who have the courage to delve into their own inner worlds,” she adds.
Bio
Nelsa Guambe (born in Chicuque, Inhambane province, in 1987) lives in Maputo and works in multiple areas including painting, illustration, photography, curatorship, production and cultural management.
She is a self-taught artist who began painting after completing her degree in Public Administration and Development Studies from UNISA (University of South Africa) in 2010.
Her recent works represent an internal dialogue about various personal and collective events and emotions.
Guambe has held several solo exhibitions, namely in the Mozambican Association of Photograpy (2015); France-Mozambique Cultural Centre (2016); DEAL Espaço Criativo (2019); DEAL Galeria (2022); and the FNB Johannesburg Art Fair (2022).
She has participated in group exhibitions in Mozambique and abroad, including: at Núcleo de Arte, Maputo (2011), Franco Moçambicano Maputo (2012), Kunstraum Gallery – Opening Maputo (2012), Detmold Lutherische Kirche, Germany (2012), Polana Serena Hotel Maputo (2014), 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair, London (2019), Latitude Art Fair, Johnesburg, (2019), Cape Town Art fair (2023), Afriart Gallery (Kampala), 2023), Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, (2023), Centro Cultural Português, Maputo (2023), IFA-PureGold: Upcycled/upgraded – a decade-long touring exhibition (Hanoi, Yangon, London, Bangkok, Hamburg, Brazil, Barcelona).
In 2017 she co-founded DEAL Galeria and won the National Children’s Literature Prize in the Illustration category.
Source: O País
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