Quiet Grounds: Tyburn Foundation Residencies 2025
17th October, 2025 –22nd October, 2025
PIASA, 118 rue du Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, Paris
At PIASA during Art Basel Paris, Tyburn Foundation gathers works from residencies in Umbria and Zimbabwe, tracing spirituality, place and memory across new forms.
Tyburn Foundation presents Quiet Grounds, a group exhibition held at PIASA during Art Basel Paris week, celebrating work from residencies across Italy and Zimbabwe in spring and summer 2025. The show features new works by Primrose Panashe Chingandu, Driaan Claassen, Michele Mathison and Mbali Tshabalala. Founded at the start of 2025 by collector and former gallerist Emma Menell, Tyburn Foundation champions early and mid-career African artists globally, continuing the legacy of Tyburn Gallery.
Courtesy of Tyburn Foundation
At Tyburn’s residency space La Foce in the Niccone Valley, Umbria, Italy, Michele Mathison continued his engagement with symbolism and the layered legacies of place. In Perch, cast in bronze, he reimagines the African fish eagle – an iconic raptor of Southern Africa found on the national emblems of Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Sudan, symbolising identity, endurance and ecological balance.
In African cosmologies, the bird is seen as a spiritual medium, a messenger between worlds. Perch reflects Mathison’s broader practice, where everyday forms are transformed into objects of reflection and fragments of ancient cultural history meet contemporary symbols, quietly disrupting Western narratives. As part of his residency, Mathison is creating Verso il Cielo, a large-scale public installation responding to the tranquility of the space and its sense of connection to the sky.
Courtesy of Tyburn Foundation
Driaan Claassen’s residency was based at Civitella Ranieri, a 15th-century castle in Umbria, as part of the Tyburn Foundation Affiliated Fellowship. At Civitella, Claassen expanded his exploration of consciousness and the human psyche, venturing beyond sculpture into painting for the first time. In new works, expanses of layered colours are punctuated with sketch-like lines and dripping pigment, creating tension between fluid movement and sharp, abstracted forms, recalling the shapes seen in Claassen’s sculpture. These paintings build on his engagement with materiality, form and emotional resonance.
In Zimbabwe, Primrose Panashe Chingandu and Mbali Tshabalala were hosted in Chitungwiza by artist Admire Kamudzengerere in a collaboration between Tyburn Foundation and Animal Farm Artist Residency. Both artists deepened their practices through intensive training in printmaking, while also experimenting across disciplines.
For Chingandu, the residency was a period of spiritual and creative renewal. Immersed in Zimbabwe’s vibrant artistic community, she reconnected with the core of her practice, gaining fresh insights through daily exchange with fellow artists and mentors. Rooted in her ongoing exploration of identity, purpose and presence, expressed through layered compositions weaving cultural and autobiographical narratives, her new works explore the interplay between personal experience and the spiritual weight of the present moment.
Courtesy of Tyburn Foundation
While printmaking formed the foundation of Tshabalala’s residency, her practice quickly expanded to encompass clay pigment painting, woodblock, collage, hand-printing, photography and ink. Influenced by Zimbabwe’s landscapes, markets and sunsets, her palette shifted towards earthier tones, while engaging with local sensibilities surrounding taboo, ritual and collective resilience. The resulting body of work addresses spiritual migration, ancestral invocation and urban resilience, continuing her inquiry into how African womanhood and memory occupy space in cities shaped by postcolonial rupture.
Founded in 1996, PIASA is known for its cutting-edge presentations of modern and contemporary art and design and is located in an 18th-century mansion on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the heart of Paris’s Golden Triangle. Tyburn Foundation is grateful to PIASA for hosting its inaugural exhibition.
Quiet Grounds: Tyburn Foundation Residencies 2025 opens on the 17th of October, 2025 until the 22nd of October, 2025 at PIASA, 118 rue du Faubourg, Saint-Honoré, Paris
©2025 Tyburn Foundation
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