"When there's a need to paint it almost feels the same way as a person would feel when they are hungry for food."
Tafadzwa Adolf Tega (b. 1985, Harare, Zimbabwe) began creating art at the age of ten, influenced by his brother, his uncle and other family members in a household where art was a shared language. After high school he studied for three years at the art school of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, focusing on painting and sculpture and discovering that painting was his greatest strength; in 2007 his first exhibition at the National Gallery opened the way to his career. In 2008 he moved to South Africa, joining the Good Hope Art Studio in Cape Town, the city where he still lives and works as a resident of Greatmore Studios.
Tega's painting is inseparable from the experience of migration. Decades of political and economic instability have forced many Zimbabweans, including the artist and members of his family, to emigrate, learning to make ends meet in foreign countries without forgoing ambition. His portraits are born from the photographs in which his countrymen represent themselves at their best, dressed elegantly against glamorous backgrounds: images suspended between joy and desire on one side, exploitation and alienation on the other, which Tega translates into monumental, theatrical compositions where his subjects take centre stage with grandiosity and pride in the face of change. The recurring wallpaper of zumbani leaves, the tea leaf of the fever tree used as a medicinal aid in Zimbabwe, composes the background of his portraits as a symbol of the birth home, a token of remembrance and a protective talisman for the journey ahead. Faith runs beneath everything: Tega declares God's creation as the source of his themes, paints on impulse, with brush, palette knife and his hands, without planning his palette, and conceives his work as a testimony intended to bless whoever encounters it, in an imagery of accessible symbols, the chair as an empty house, the ostrich as God's army, self-sufficient even without flight.
Tega held his first solo exhibition, "Africa Without Borders", at the AVA Gallery, Cape Town (2012), followed by World Art (2014) and by its reimagining at Gallery MOMO, Cape Town (2019). Solo exhibitions include "Mwana Whevu (Son of the Soil)" at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg (2020), "Harare Dream" at Foreign Agent, Lausanne (2021), "Rwendo (Journey)" at JD Malat Gallery, London (2022), "Chisi Hachieri Musi Wacharimwa: A Seed Will Take Its Time" at Everard Read, Johannesburg (2023), and "Matakadya Kare" at Everard Read, Cape Town. Selected for the Nando's Creative Exchange, he took part in the group exhibition "Home" and in the Basha Uhuru Freedom Festival, and more recently in "Rwendo Rwechokwadi: A Journey of Truth" at Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town (2025). His works are held in the collections of the University of Cape Town, the Spier Arts Trust, the Leridon Collection and Nando's. He lives and works in Cape Town.