It is just over a year since Robert Mugabe stepped down as President of Zimbabwe…. and the dancing in the streets we all saw on the telly seems to have been echoed by an outpouring of art so riotous it would make a carnival seem by comparison as solemn as a funeral service.

Around 30 examples of exactly what I mean are currently featured in an exhibition called Harare Contemporary that ensures a taste of that jubilation can be enjoyed in East Africa.

Thanks to another bold collabo (and more of that growing trend later) 15 artists from Zimbabwe are presenting recent paintings, sculpture, wall hangings and a video at the Circle Art Gallery in Lavington, Nairobi, until December 21.

The result is a whirling dance of colour, in a painterly explosion so energetic that you are almost forced to take a step back before pitching in again.

The many influences on these young artists are plain to see and proudly worn. There is an innocence about this that is rather attractive; open, honest and fresh, experimenting as you go, unsophisticated yes but having great fun along the way.

To take just two:

Wycliffe Mendoza offers two stencil and collage pieces that have Picasso’s broad brush figures confidently gamboling all over the composition.

They reminded me of those carefree nymphs Picasso painted on his pottery vases and plates. Cheerful works that frolic on the wall.
Gresham Nyaude seems to be obsessed by Francis Bacon.

His Untitled III sets a distorted and apparently screaming central figure, crouching on a table and jutting towards us like a projectile; an effect achieved both by the wildly slashing brushstrokes that give his work its visceral strength and also by employing precisely the same curved background line used by Bacon in many of his later full length portrait studies.

It defines and separates the vertical planes and presents the figure as though spotlight on a stage.

'Untitled lll' by Gresham Nyaud. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY | NMG

Two of Nyaude’s other paintings from the same series also show figures in torment; Bacon in subject as well as in execution. His attack, however, is even wilder than Bacon’s — think more of James Ensor, the Belgian Expressionist — and is correspondingly far less controlled.
But there is a luscious authority to Nyaude’s painting that beguiles.

Others worth a long look include Miriro Mwandiyambira’s unnerving Unbroken Wedding Veil, a wall hanging fashioned from fabric and hair extensions; a couple of prints of heads by Franklyn Dzingai (I particularly admired Mask for its verve and strong colours); and the jumpy, excited line of Option Nyahunzi’s ink and paper cutouts of couples and smokers.

Then too there are Helen Teede’s large canvases (185cm by 170cm) from her series Grandpa’s Ghost Ship, which through flurries of gestural marks tell of her love of the land and, as a white Zimbabwean, of a shared humanity across racial divides.

This exhibition results from close co-operation between the Circle and the First Floor Gallery in Harare, whose co-founder Valerie Kabov curated this show.

It is the latest collabo involving Circle director Danda Jaroljmek, who is committed to the idea of working closely with other galleries on the continent.

Obvious advantages include economies of scale, big savings when for instance sharing the cost of taking a booth at an international art fair, access to interesting artists perhaps previously unknown to your usual client base — in other words, a bigger pool in which to fish — and importantly being part of an information and ideas-exchange group that benefits and strengthens all parties.

They also give a small gallery the chance of a much higher profile and the opportunity to exhibit at fairs that would otherwise be out of its reach.
Jaroljmek has already taken a booth at the Art X fair in Lagos, with Addis Fine Art (from the Ethiopian capital) and the AfriArt Gallery of Kampala, and at the 1:54 fair in New York with Addis Fine Art.

Now she has helped to form the Emerging African Art Gallery Association (the EAAGA; fairly trips off the tongue) to develop inter-gallery co-operation and create an invaluable information exchange with galleries in Angola, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and of course, Zimbabwe.

And if Harare Contemporary is an example of what we can expect from continued collabos, then it deserves a very warm welcome indeed.

For me this was a startling but extremely encouraging introduction to Zimbabwean art.

Bye-bye Bob, hello happiness…..