Helen Lieros’s painterly production, a continual investigation of her dual Greek-Zimbabwean heritage, was shaped by moments of political and personal crisis. In this text, Zimbabwean-born, Cape Town–based curator Tandazani Dhlakama recalls Lieros and how she fostered platforms that were conducive to artistic expression and challenged the status quo in Zimbabwe—namely the Circle collective, Gallery Delta, and Gallery magazine—vehicles she used to equip and empower her peers and the generations that followed.
Helen Lieros (1940–2021) consistently found opportunities in crises and taught multiple generations of artists in her orbit to do the same. To rural art teachers who did not have traditional art materials, she once said, “Let’s work on newspaper, with mud.”1 Her dual Greek-Zimbabwean identity, which underpinned her practice, was foregrounded by crisis. Her father, a merchant navy man, was shipwrecked on the coast of Cape Town coming from Europe.2 Instead of waiting for the arrival of a new ship, he accepted an invitation from a friend, trekked north, and settled in what is present-day Gweru, Zimbabwe, where Lieros was born.3 Even though her mother ensured that she was exposed to Greek theatre and music, Lieros found her birthplace “suffocating as a little girl.”4 At age fifteen, she specialized in piano compositional studies and claimed that she could “see notes in color,” and yet she yearned for more.5 She lamented, “I was brought up in the British colonial type of painting, which I deplored. I had to do the little butterflies, the little flowers, and the little this and the little that in watercolors.”6
A recipient of several awards and scholarships, Lieros studied art in Switzerland and Italy between 1958 and 1963. Her world opened up as she engaged with the work of Georges Braque (1882–1963), Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), and Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), which gave her a broader visual lexicon. Since returning to Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) was too expensive, study breaks brought about occasions to visit Greece and to trace her European heritage. But what Europe failed to give her were the rich ochers and brilliant blues that emanated from being immersed in the Zimbabwean landscape. These are the very hues that Lieros later reinserted in her work in retaliation against years of being instructed by Swiss professors to gray them out (see figs. 2, 3).7 “As I began to re-identify myself with the African environment, so my painting became broader and my color stronger, symbolic of the felt experience,” she noted in 1995.8
From her student days until her death, Lieros’s work was fraught by the complexities of belonging to multiple geographies, a situation she described as a constant “fight between who and what I am.”9 Her practice involved drawing out the similarities within Zimbabwean and Greek rituals, and depicting them repeatedly through sheep, goat, bull, and bird motifs (see figs. 4, 5). Such is the case of The Rise of the Jongwe I (1981), in which a cock is a veiled allegory for Zimbabwe’s ruling party. Ironically, she earned a President’s Award of Honour for this very serigraph soon after Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980 (see fig. 6).
