MADRID.- Travesía Cuatro announced the representation of Virginia Chihota. The artist will be jointly represented by Tiwani Contemporary.
Introspective in nature, the work of Virginia Chihota (1983, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe) is deeply shaped by personal experience—both landmark and everyday—and the emotional landscapes that accompany it. Her practice reflects on intimacy, faith, and the human figure, engaging themes such as childbearing, childrearing, kinship, marriage, bereavement, and spiritual questioning. Chihota visualises her inner world as an emotionally shifting and symbolic terrain marked by vigilance, self-questioning, and moments of transformative resolution. Her works, at once mundane and transcendental, are rife with allusions to daily life and interwoven with religious and folkloric symbolism, rendered with a raw, expressionist verve.
Trained as a printmaker, she employs screen-printing with striking confidence and originality, mixing printing techniques with drawing to produce compositions of formal and emotional complexity, where figures—often female—dissolve into near-abstraction or emerge from billowing fields of colour, bodies caught in strange embraces or awkward postures that signal both vulnerability and spiritual alertness.
Virginia Chihota currently lives and works in New York, USA. She studied at the B.A.T. Visual Arts Studio at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, in 2004 and recieved a diploma in Fine Arts from the Harare Polytechnic in 2006. Chihota represented Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and was awarded the Prix Canson the same year. In 2021, her works were commissioned by the Opéra National de Paris for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.
In 2026, Chihota will be having a major solo exhibition at CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville, Spain.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Virginia Chihota: Munoonei kana makanditarisa nhai Mwari? / What do you see when you look at me ohh God?, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2025); Virginia Chihota: A visit to the other, Museums Zutphen, Zutphen, Netherlands (solo exhibition at Museum Henriette Polak, 2025); Virginia Chihota: Kuenda Mberi “Moving On”, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City, Mexico (2025) and Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2024); Chibereko Chakaramba Kuudzirwa (The Womb Refused To Be Told), Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2023); Whose Am I? I Am Not My Own (Ndiri Waani? Handisi Muridi Wangu), Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2021); Uri Mwana Wani? (Whose Child Are You?), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2019); Virginia Chihota, ULUCG Artists’ Pavilion, Montenegro (2019); Mhamha, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2019).
Group shows include: Hurukuro: Antony Bumhira and Virginia Chihota, curated by Augusto Arbizo, James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA (2025); As Feeling Births Idea, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (2024); 35th Ljubljana Biennale, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2023); I See You, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, Nigeria (2022); The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2022); Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry and Resistance, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2019); Close: Drawn Portraits, The Drawing Room, London, UK (2018).
Virginia Chihota's work is in the collections of Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, Norway; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate, London, UK; Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar; Pérez Art Museum Miami, United States; FRAC Picardie, Amiens, France; The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe and the U.S. Department of State.
