Bad dreams burst through the walls in Portia Zvavahera’s exhibition of paintings, with the Zimbabwean artist digging deep into both her psyche and the spiritual forces that drive her. The result, for Zvavahera’s first exhibition in Europe, is an epic series of works shaped by an unholy alliance of fear and love channelled from her fevered imagination. The rats may be poised to pounce, but through the swirl of colours where they hide, her only mission is to keep the children safe from harm.

This moves from the early devotions of ‘His Presence’, ‘Labour Ward’ and ‘Labour Pains’ in the Fruitmarket’s downstairs gallery, to the night terrors of works created in the last year which are shown upstairs. This accidentally symbolic ascension charts a journey that is both holy and possessed. With titles such as ‘Fighting Energies’, ‘Hide There’ and ‘Lifted Away’, it is no accident that the exhibition’s title, Zvakazarurwa, is the Shona word for ‘revelations’.

Zvavahera’s paintings are highly charged torrents of emotion expressed with a deep-set urgency to exorcise all the monsters that haunt her nightmares. There is pain here, but also a faith in some higher being that comes through a sense of movement, with figures’ hands outstretched, whether in praise or else protecting their brood. Presented in collaboration with Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, where it debuted, for all the horrors on show in Zvakazarurwa, it is love that propels everything Zvavahera does. This gives her work a physical as well as spiritual energy that transcends the badness even as it is made manifest in painted form. It is this strength that saves her. For now, at least, all Zvavahera’s demons are purged in a vivid display of higher power.

Portia Zvavahera, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until Sunday 25 May.