Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1989, visual artist Prudence Chimutuwah was first introduced to practicing art at Mabelreign Girls High and was inspired by Seminar Mpofu and Colleen Madamombe, both prominent female sculptors. She studied at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe School of Visual Arts and Design from 2009 to 2011 and majored in painting and sculpture. Chimutuwah was inspired by sculptors working at Chitungwiza Arts Center, where she is currently based. While she initially wanted to pursue a career in sculpture, she found it to be a male-dominated field and thus began to reconsider her area of focus. In 2015, Chimutuwah discovered a fascination for collage and since then, she has been collecting recycled material to produce her work.
Chimutuwah’s images are subtly influenced by contemporary African fashion, text, and symbols. Her work fuses text from novels, magazines, and newspapers, with banknotes, painting, and print-making. Her work primarily depicts women, their daily lives, economic aspirations, spirituality, desire for recognition, the energy they put forth, and the world they dominate or subordinate to. She is inspired by her gender and how it adapts to the ever-changing socio-economic environment and seeks for her work to narrate, describe, and inform the audience on the evolving world of women in patriarchal societies. She views women as the incubators of society. What is within them is nurtured and multiplied. It inspires and shapes her creative vision and through her work, she looks to deposit positive energy back into her fellow women.
Her achievements include participating in major group shows at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and Wild Geese Art Fair, as well as exhibitions including MaDzimbabwe, AKKA Project, Dubai, UAE, 2022, Past & Present, Gallery Delta, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2021, and Freedom, Gallery Delta, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2021.
Her exhibition, PURPLE RHYTHM, was nominated for best exhibition at the National Arts Merit Awards (NAMA) in Zimbabwe in 2020. She was also short-listed as a finalist at the ILO Green Enterprise competition for best mixed media artwork and received an Award of Merit for originality from Gallery Delta in 2020. Her work proudly hangs in several embassies and diplomats’ residences in Zimbabwe, as well as private homes and institutions.