* Richard Mudariki, (b. Zimbabwe,1985) Signed (lower right) Acrylic on Canvas 95 x 65cm (37.4 x 25.

* Richard Mudariki, (b. Zimbabwe,1985) Signed (lower right) Acrylic on Canvas 95 x 65cm (37.4 x 25.6in)

Richard Mudariki is an award-winning Zimbabwean artist born in Harare in 1985. Richard studied art under the mentorship of Helen Leiros and Greg Shaw at Gallery Delta, and obtained a BA Honours Degree in Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Studies and Museum Studies from Midlands State University in 2009. He moved to Cape Town in 2011 where he now resides as a full-time professional painter. He has exhibited widely in Harare and Cape Town, and his works were included in the Museum of Modern Art of Equatorial Guinea`s exhibition at the 2012 FNB Joburg Art Fair. His sell out exhibition `My Reality` was held at Johans Borman Fine Art in 2012.

Richard Mudariki`s art is issue-driven; it addresses a wide range of injustices such as the violation of human rights, dictatorships, new colonialism, corporate greed, gender stereotyping, censorship and rape inter alia. He regularly re-appropriates canonical Western masterpieces to a Modern African context, to not only cast light on the iniquities of contemporary Africa, but also to reflect on the on-going crisis that obtains in the country of his birth.

The distinct visual language deployed in Mudariki`s paintings, uses a mise-en-scene so visually arresting that it transcends any chronological and geographic particularity; it becomes a timeless and universal statement conveyed with such gripping, imaginative assurance that the resultant image entirely transcends the artist`s activist goals.

The artist ensures we never mistake his fictive universe with reality, and witty anachronisms are deployed to this end. Cubic boxes regularly occur in his work, injecting a surreal complication into imagery which was originally constructed in a purely naturalist manner. Ominous overtones go hand in hand with humour, the apparatus of naturalism is turned upside-down and space is warped and distorted. Mudariki`s introduction of logical inconsistencies to his handling of light, space, perspective and scale sabotage illusionist goals, and underscore the identity of his paintings as representations of reality, rather than reality itself. This invites an analytical- rather than an emotional response, encouraging us to consider the political and social implications of the image.

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