Troy Makaza

Troy Makaza is a leading contemporary Zimbabwean artist whose innovative practice playfully dismantles the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and textile craft. A graduate of Harare’s National Gallery School of Visual Art and Design (NGSVAD), Makaza famously rejected traditional artistic formats to develop his own signature hybrid medium: pigment-infused industrial silicone. By blending inks, tints, and silicone into fluid cords, he creates a highly customizable material that he can cast, paint, mold, and structurally weave. Makaza's resulting wall-bound and suspended installations manifest as glossy, hyper-saturated, and deeply tactile spiderwebs of color. While these synthetic agglomerations exude a surreal, almost alien modern aesthetic, their physical construction directly references traditional Shona craft lineages like weaving and tapestry. His intricate knotting and twisting of silicone strands act as potent metaphors for the fluid, intertwined social and intimate spaces of 21st-century Zimbabwe. As a millennial born-free artist operating in a highly globalized landscape, Makaza utilizes his visceral medium to map out and reconcile competing cultural, political, and historical ideologies. His shifting imagery constantly oscillates between representation and abstraction, drawing inspiration from popular visual culture, traditional Zimbabwean proverbs, and ecological concerns like land use and climate change. Makaza's genre-defying approach has earned him widespread international acclaim, culminating in his selection to represent Zimbabwe at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Supported early in his career by esteemed local mentors like Moffat Takadiwa, Makaza has successfully redefined contemporary African art. He presents a visual language that remains intensely locally resonant while capturing the global imagination.