Artist's Info

Tapfuma Gutsa Catalog

Nicholas Mukomberanwa Catalog

Henry Munyaradzi Catalog

Joseph Muzondo Catalog

Wailing Queen
 
For Gutsa history is key. In the words of art critic Michael Brenson writing in The New York Times (January 19, 1990) Tapfuma Gutsa is "a citizen of the world." He finds important precedents not only among the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and the anonymous sculptors of his own African culture but also in more recent models. "I really admire Isamu Noguchi...I really found an anchor there... Beyond that I go back to Brancusi and through Brancusi I come back to African masks."  "Over the years I've been trying, even consciously, to move out of the mainstream of the stone sculpture movement...I would like my work to be seen as an attempt to break new ground."  His aim is to create work that will engage and challenge, rather than simply please and delight his audience.  "Beautiful stones don't speak back...I think if you want to get to people's hearts and minds you don't want to dole out the whole thing in one sitting.  You need somebody to look at the thing and come back to it again and get engaged with the work. The work is about engagement. One-to-one. The viewer must think."

In 1989 Tapfuma Gutsa was one of a handful of artists from Africa whom curator Grace Stanislaus selected to exemplify the theme of a major exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem--Contemporary African Art: Changing Traditions. Now, in 1996, Gutsa's latest work fulfills the promise of artistic toughness and invention that was presaged in the works shown at the Studio Museum in 1990. They are works that accept and simultaneously set out to challenge conventions of Zimbabwe sculpture.
 
Trees are Known by The Names of Their Fruit

By the time Gutsa finished his schooling in the mid 1970s, the revolutionary struggles that were to end in independence for Zimbabwe in 1980 were well underway. So, although like many another African artist his first art school experience was through the patronage of the church,at the Driefontein Mission Art School, where he spent one year--in this climate of change Gutsa may have sensed the need to move beyond the wood and stone carving that was being taught at Driefontein. He wanted to strike out on a path that diverged from the high modernist works of the 1960s and 70s Zimbabwean artists with their emphasis on form, truth to materials, and the seductive beauty of highly polished stone. "Over the years I've been trying, even consciously, to move out of the mainstream of the stone sculpture movement... I would like my work to be seen as an attempt to break new ground." For Gutsa, moving his work forward involved removing himself temporarily from Zimbabwe, and in 1982 he received a British Council scholarship to London's City and Guilds School of Art. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1985.  In fact, Gutsa recognized, as others at the time did not, the seminal importance of the new departures that were evident around 1980 in the stone sculptures of John Takawira. Takawira's work was becoming more rugged and he began to leave significant parts of the stone unpolished and unfinished. In so doing he revealed the inner struggles that lay beneath the smooth surfaces of these works. 

Gutsa began to push his challenge to the pureness and integrity of stone beyond what others could imagine. Working a single piece of stone to produce differentiations in textures and color was one thing, but creating assemblages of multiple stones and combining these with other materials both natural and manmade-wood, bones, and metals was entirely another. It was a move that can be likened to the Baroque sculptors of seventeenth century Europe, who, in their quest to create more energetic works, challenged the classic repose of Renaissance sculpture that relied on the integrity of a single block of stone. Boldly these artists carved flamboyant draperies and gesturing limbs from separate slabs of marble and joined them to carved torsos to allow their creations greater freedom of movement and broader and grander gestures. 
 
Odd Coupling
 
Like the great Italian Baroque artist Bernini, who added gilding to his grandiose figures of Saints and Popes and combined different colored marbles for stunning pictorial effects, Tapfuma Gutsa assembles materials in diverse ways. He joins wood, metal and stone and adds found objects and materials scavenged from his surroundings, "Whenever I travel I pick up bits and pieces and eventually these pieces end up as parts of the sculpture...or a piece breaks and you are provoked into recycling the parts by the very fact that you had put time into making them in the first place." Odd Coupling, 1996 is an assemblage that tweaks the solemn high modernism of Anthony Caro's "table" pieces. Acknowledging Caro's work, Gutsa questions modernist sculpture's insistence on pure, industrial materials. And perhaps in a comment on the severe formalism of modernism, Odd Coupling appears to have been set down quite casually on its base--a low table painted in Gutsa's signature blue. 
 
The Miracle of Moses
 
At times Gutsa applies paint, blue as lapis lazuli, to rough stone, exploring the pictorial and graphic potential of the material. This deep "Yves Klein" blue is another of the artist's homages to a modernist forebear. At the same time in The Miracle of Moses, 1996 the celestial blue color suggests the heavens and describes the water that sprang from a rock through Moses's faith. By extension this relief with its surrealistic floating clouds and reference to the elements is an affirmation of humanity that cuts across generations and nations: "I tried to reason out the emptiness of the desert and still suggest hope."  Tapfuma Gutsa's aim is to create work that will engage and challenge, rather than simply please and delight his audience. "Beautiful stones don't speak back...I think if you want to get to people's hearts and minds you don't want to dole out the whole thing in one sitting. You need somebody to look at the thing and come back to it again and get engaged with the work. The work is about engagement. One-toone. The viewer must think." 
 
Chimpira
 
Chimpira, 1996 is one of a group of works in which Gutsa deliberately removes all associations of material and form. Five flat stones culled from the dried-out bed of a lake are threaded together on an off-cut of timber used to repair the roof of the artist's house. The result is a strong and abstract assemblage whose title--from the Japanese "anata wachimpira", which means "thug"--is a suggested point of entry for the viewer rather than a description. Some of Gutsa's earlier works, like The Snake (1988), while displaying innovative surface treatments and new materials, come close to the visual representations of aspects of Zimbabwean life and culture of the traditional masters of Zimbabwe stone sculpture. But already in 1988 Gutsa ventured beyond these boundaries in the earliest of his Guitar series. The very notion of a series and the continuing exploration of form and idea which it implies puts into question the concept of the finite nature of an artwork. 
 
The Guitar
 
The most recent in the series, Guitar (1996) has a complexity of form that compels the viewer to examine it closely from all sides in order to tease out its many allusions. The most obvious, perhaps, is the conflation of musical instrument and the female figure that became a cliché of Cubist painting and sculpture. Gutsa is well aware of this association and its lineage--a 1990 work from the series is titled Lady Guitar. "Picasso looked at African masks...I'm free to plunder also."  But the layers of meaning go well beyond any mere borrowing. Guitar is indeed intended to evoke a sensual response, its hollowed out stone body leads up through a long sinuously curving neck of wood to a carved top in which are inserted tuning keys of highly polished serpentine. Here polished stone is used not for its sheer beauty but for its evocative power which alludes to the precious nature of the instrument, both in the craftsmanly care with which it is constructed "there's an element of jewelry in guitar making" and the musician's careful handling which the artist compares to a lover's embrace, "when a person is playing an instrument he cherishes it." 
In fact the juxtaposition of raw wood and polished stone enhance the sensual nature of Guitar as simultaneously rough and refined. The strings which stretch between the stone and wood parts link the organic body and neck with a tensile force that is most apparent in side view and which itself evokes the string works of constructivists like Gabo and Pevsner. This side or profile view also reveals an anthropomorphic thrust to the carving of the "head". Guitar-like musical instruments are found in many cultures and abound in Africa. For Gutsa the instrument has specific cultural associations. "The guitar has played a big role in black history...[it was played] for comfort on the plantations...just as later with the blues, jazz, reggae, through music people could express things they couldn't say in words...When I make these guitars I think of people like Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Marley." 

Indeed Gutsa's work is concerned with history in its broadest sense, " ...the things I comment on have to do with history...I'm trying to record what I see around me and put it down in an artistic way." Like the finest artist-provocateurs Gutsa can use his work to shake his audience into paying attention to history. His 1995 piece African Genesis came out of the Genesis Program, an intercultural collaborative exhibition between three German and three Zimbabwean artists. Gutsa had made some metal coneshaped forms, about a meter in diameter, which echoed the shapes of the thatched roofs of the round stone buildings on his property. He covered these with a film of cow-dung, commonly used as mortar and floor covering in African domestic construction, and remarked to gallery owner and curator Derek Huggins that these forms were "volcanoes...there are some in Africa. The cow dung is for the crap of Africa, and for fertility." African Genesis consists of three volcanoes set out on the ground around which Gutsa assembled five life-size forms wrapped in fabric and bound with strips of bark. "The spectacle of death in Africa" he told Huggins. "Ethiopian famine and the Rwanda genocide...the forms are corpses...or they are sleeping forms waiting for life. There is genesis... death and recreation and regeneration all the time, at every moment." Thus Gutsa acknowledges the universal cycle of death and rebirth within which the specific African experience of life and death are located, by drawing attention to the paradoxes that coexist in his reality-the crap and the fertility. 
 
The Dress II
 
The turn that these volcanoes form took next is a measure of Gutsa's inventiveness. In the first of a series, Dress I (1990), the volcanoes now encrusted in a glittering mosaic, not of cow dung, but of shards of sparkling colored stone fragments have evolved into the cone shaped skirt of an hieratic headless figure. Flat pieces of metal arranged in a patterned circle draw attention to the line of the hips and, remarks Gutsa half-jokingly, may signify a "chastity-belt." Inverted Ndebele baskets, separated by discarded conveyor-belt rollers which create a tiny pinched-in waist, form the torso. The elegance of these forms invokes the touch of a gifted, visionary couturier-- which proves to be the case. "The females in my family make clothes. One is a professional," says Gutsa. Matters of dress and gender are intriguing. "Why do women wear dresses - its a uniform. The intricate way a garment is put together interests me very, very much." These gracious, stately, decorative forms express an ideal of womanhood. They are also highly seductive. One would like to be able to wear such a garment. And yet the conceit can easily disappear. The whole exists through a balancing of parts and can be dismantled with ease. Atop the volcano/skirt nothing is fixed permanently. While, as Gutsa points out, this serves the practical function of allowing easy transportation of the work, it also stands metaphorically both for the delicate balance required to maintain a position of beautiful stasis and the ease with which such a state of repose can erupt and collapse.
The Dress II
 
The fascination that female clothing holds for the artist is seen also in Dress II, 1996. This diaphanous creation in which two artfully arranged stones are girded to a spray of wires and bamboo by a shining band of metal that signifies the fashionable pinched in waist is designed as a wall piece. As it hangs against the wall like a strapless ballgown awaiting its wearer, the paradox that the empty, light-weight bodice is made of hardwood and the knowledge of the impossibility of this confection ever being inhabited by a real body, transforms it into a magical creation
and back again.

The Cathedral (woman)
 
Transformative power and Gutsa's awe and respect for the female gender - perhaps born of Africa's largely matrilineal societies is encapsulated in Cathedral, 1996 [at left] where an abstracted female torso of stone culminates in two pinnacles of wood - the one suggesting a head the other a church spire. As the spectator circles around this piece the relationships alter subtly and invite a participatory reading.
 
 
Lunar Woman
 
"What really makes a woman happen?" asks Gutsa as he surveys his mysterious all-knowing Lunar Woman, 1996 [right] whose rotating head is encrusted with egg-shells.
 
 
 The Assassin
 
In counterpoint to these celebratory gendered forms is The Assassin, 1996 [right] an ambivalent, statuesque figure of wood whose small head in the form of a sharp-beaked bird Gutsa likens to the Egyptian god Horus. A threatening crown of porcupine quills protrudes from the head and on its back is carved a quiver containing bamboo arrows. The figure's birdy eye pierces the viewer with an unsettling gaze. The creature evokes all the dark forces and fearful images associated with the powers of witchcraft, as Gutsa confronts his audience with the realization of its worst fears—of being transformed into such a chimera in the dead of night. He has set out to create a sinister and dangerous looking form--the kind of halfhuman/half-animal that most people can only dimly imagine.Yet the sinister aspect is undercut by the figure's gesture as a flattened hand seems to pull the body back from confrontation, and the realistic feet planted firmly on a small box-like plinth seem to hold it motionless. The Assassin is a mythic figure that cuts across specific mythologies much as Gutsa recognizes that societal myths are common to all cultures though their embodiment may shift from culture to culture. "For any society to understand the universe, it must understand the process of passing through life and the afterlife. People do this through myth...Sometimes I go back to Egypt, Assyria, the Greeks. I look everywhere...and in the end I distill all the information and empower myself to create the sculpture." 
Blue Tower of Life
 
In some works Gutsa plays out aspects of his personal history. Blue Tower of Life, 1996 incorporates fragments of reality in a loose and open-ended way. "I wanted to make an architectural construction," Gutsa explains. Taking a rough monolithic pillar-like stone, the gift of a friend, he hollowed out a series of niches on all four sides and painted them and the top of the column his signature, jewel-like lapis lazusome the fruits of long-ago travels that have "been around for a long time." In one "a stone from the river where I spread the ashes of my son." In another a small fragment of sculpted stone "made by my young brotherhe couldn't resolve it. For me its a phallic thing...and also a small bird." There is also a piece of a sponge; a crushed plastic container "from which we drank cool drinks as kids"; two empty shells preserved from a high-school biology lesson; an exploded seed pod; a gnarled and twisted plant form that is a reminder of the imperfections of nature; and a coconut sent by a friend in Mozambique. Gutsa remarks wryly how the markings on the coconut make it appear like a monkey's head and it is clear how the possibility of imaginative transformation inheres in all these objects and forms a crucial part of the meaning of this work. A flattened circular stone is fixed on a movable rod to the top of the column, almost like a weather vane that can change direction. The objects are loosely balanced in their niches, inviting the viewer to rearrange and reorder them. "As an artist," says Gutsa "I feel I owe my audience a chance to play with these things, to become my friends, my play friends, to be surprised and to find other possibilities which I haven't imagined." The power and tension of the column is in its ability to invite the viewer in to play and at the same time to distance itself from our prying eyes through the knowledge that we are privileged participants in an intimate performance of personal history. "Its a kind of library...a record of life. This is a column which talks of my history, my existence, my life." 
The Grandfather's Coat
 
As much as he eschews the purity of polished stone, Gutsa acknowledges both the work and mentorship of his older artist colleagues like Nicholas Mukomberanwa. As a self-styled rebel it is appropriate that to commemorate a personal link to the past Gutsa turns easily back to work in stone. The Grandfather's Coat, 1996 shows that Gutsa is every bit the virtuoso at stone carving while his daring approach to the manipulation of form takes the medium beyond the boundaries set by tradition. Made as a tribute to the artist's grandfather "a grand old man who
walked all the way from Malawi to Zimbabwe", Gutsa recalls how, "when no one was watching, I would try [the coat] on to feel what it is like to be an adult. I have great memories of the friendship we share." The coat is a masterpiece of invention. With its sharp angles and carved details--lapels, cuffs and buttons--one empty sleeve tossed carelessly over the shoulder, the other hanging down in a remarkable approximation to the real material it represents, the coat recalls Jim Dine's graphic depictions of everyday clothing. The surface is cross-hatched to create a surface texture more drawn than carved, and the edges and folds of the garment reinforce this approximation to a graphic medium. Within this palpably real form shelters a child-like figure--the artist-- dressed in a long anonymous garment. The round abstracted forms of head and eyes are at once a self-portrait and a depiction of everyman, curiously akin to the simplified generalizations of the figures carved on Romanesque churches. This work which marries reality to idea is at once anecdotal--depicting the artist's connection to his beloved grandfather--and universal, as Gutsa pays subtle homage to his artistic antecedents. 
 
Tapfuma Gutsa lives and works in a reclusive mode in remote Shurugwe 300 miles from Harare on property he acquired in what he considers a symbolic repossession of the land of his ancestors. His position as an artist has not been an easy one to sustain in Zimbabwe where the commodification of art-though rooted in the need for sources of income--sometimes reaches alarming proportions. "I'm not against someone making a living, but on the other hand, here in Zimbabwe we don't have enough information about the history of sculpture and in some cases sculptors look upon making work as a job rather than a way of life."  For Gutsa history is key. In the words of art critic Michael Brenson writing in The New York Times (January 19, 1990) Tapfuma Gutsa is "a citizen of the world." He finds important precedents not only among the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and the anonymous sculptors of his own African culture but also in more recent models. "I really admire Isamu Noguchi...I really found an anchor there... Beyond that I go back to Brancusi and through Brancusi I come back to African masks."  Unless otherwise noted all quotes are from a videotaped interview between Doreen Sibanda and Tapfuma Gutsa, August 1996.
 
c 1996 Brenda Danilowitz

               The story of how Mukomberanwa and other Zimbabwean stone sculptors came to occupy a firmly established position in the international world of art museums and galleries goes back many years--some observers claim as far back as the fourteenth century and the construction of a series of architecturally complex stone villages, the zimbabwes or "ruler's places" from which the newly independent country (the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia) took its name in 1980. The ruined remains of these settlements were discovered in the 19th century, and the largest became known as "Great Zimbabwe". Along with what remained of the architecture of Great Zimbabwe were found small artifacts, impressively carved totems, and imposing bird-like figures fashioned from the stone that is an abundant resource in mineral-rich Zimbabwe.

               The discovery mystified Western archaeologists for years. Their prejudices, combined with the political agenda of the colonial government, would not allow them to admit that such sophisticated productions were the work of the uneducated, and, to them, primitive and uncivilized, local black peoples. But there was no evidence of any other settled population in the region and today there is no longer any doubt that the early inhabitants and creators of these settlements were the ancestors of present day Zimbabweans.

               Although there is no evidence at all for a direct link between the stone birds and figures of Great Zimbabwe and the renaissance in stone carving that began in the early 1960s, the resonances are tantalizing. As Celia Winter-Irving has pointed out, the shared material and methods indicate that the present day sculpture is not "a totally isolated phenomenon" but a new occurrence of creative expression which has existed for centuries. Mukomberanwa's large sculpture Spirit of Dzimbabwe (1982) a chimeric form--part bird, part man--pays homage to this tradition: "...I chose a big stone and gave it a human head to emphasize the spiritual power it has, and the markings which are found on the ancient Zimbabwe birds. I wanted to show this strong brooding spirit protecting Zimbabwe Ruins and through that the whole country." (in Prominent Sculptors of Zimbabwe. Nicholas Mukomberanwa. 1989)

               But Mukomberanwa was not drawn to his art by any atavistic impulse. His journey began with his own relentless drive to obtain an education against the odds in a country under colonial rule, where access to learning for the indigenous population was a low priority. His schooling began only in 1950, when he was ten years old. The family moved south from their village, Buhera, where there was no school, to Zvishavane, where Mukomberanwa's father managed to get work on an asbestos mine and the ten year old Nicholas was enrolled in school for the first time. A few years later when the family returned to Buhera, Mukomberanwa, determined to continue his education, stayed on and supported himself on the measly pay (about $3 a month) of a part-time gardener. From there he went on to a mission school, St Benedicts, where, now aged seventeen, he had two years of rigorous academic education. Although he had been drawing informally for a number of years, formal art classes were not available. From St Benedicts, encouraged by his teachers, Mukomberanwa moved on to the Serima Mission, whose founder, Father Groeber, a Swiss priest, was also an architect and taught the students techniques of carving in wood. The aim was to produce art with religious significance, but for Mukomberanwa it was a golden opportunity: "At Serima the seed of art was sown in my heart," he recalls "I began to see things clearer and think positively about what I wanted to achieve."  

               In the early 1960s there was little place for a black artist in Zimbabwe. So, to support himself, Mukomberanwa joined the British South Africa Police, one of the few sources of secure employment in the country. "I think I was a good policeman...in my relations with the public. I tried to teach people to trust each other and to reconcile themselves," he reflects. Every moment of spare time was spent drawing. While his police duties daily brought Mukomberanwa face to face with the harsh realities of existence, his art was a route into a world of dense and meaningful forms and symbols of his own creation. Fate was on his side.

               In 1952 Frank McEwen, artist, critic and exhibition organizer, born in Mexico, brought up in England, educated in France, was invited by the Southern Rhodesia government to advise on the planning and construction of a new art museum in Salisbury (now Harare). When the Rhodes National Gallery, a model of mid-century modernism, was opened in 1955, McEwen was made the first director. With his wide connections in the international art world, he was a natural to oversee this permanent collection of European painting and sculpture and to bring European-style culture to this "apathetic and reluctant" colonial outpost.

               But McEwen had other ideas, and chief among them was the nurturing of local African artists. So, taking counsel from a museum employee, Thomas Mukarobgwa, he informed himself about the local African culture. In 1957 he started a painting workshop at the museum, and in 1965 sculpture was added. McEwen was thoroughly schooled in the mainstream modernist ideas of the French art world of the 1930s. These included a return to classical forms which affected even such a radical movement as cubism. The previously fractured surfaces of cubist painting and sculpture became more controlled and smoothed over, and issues of formal beauty and purity took precedence over the mundane subject matter of early cubism. In sculpture, a belief in truth to materials and the integrity of direct carving was linked to a reverence for the direct appeal of primitive art and the notion of the unschooled artist whose innocent vision was unclouded by the traumas of the two massive wars from which Europe, at mid-century, was struggling to recover.

               This background, and his knowledge and understanding of artists like Moore, Brancusi, and Lipschitz is a key to understanding both McEwen's excitement at the opportunity to develop an art workshop in Africa, and the methods he employed: "Instead of cramming the unformed mind with foreign information, example and imposed subject matter, it is accepted from the start that the sensitive latent artist possesses the spirit of art, to be brought out, respected and nurtured" (McEwen quoted in "Frank McEwen Returns to Origins: New Directions for African Arts" African Arts 1:2, 1967). While McEwen desired to avoid imposing European ideas on the artists who attended his workshop (he deliberately did not call it a "school") it was inevitable that his artistic predilections showed up in their work. In Mukomberanwa's work, a piece which comes closest to the modernist idiom is Spiritual Head (#1). The references to Brancusi (whether conscious or not) can be read less as imitation and more as a late twentieth century restatement of the modernist ideal. The context of Mukomberanwa's work, and the specificity of the features encourage us to assess it on its own terms--to enjoy its smooth surface, its simultaneous simplicity and complexity, and the fineness of its lines and its outlines. Spiritual Head, like many of Mukomberanwa's work is infused with the meanings of Shona cosmology. In Shona life all significant events, whether of good or of bad fortune are associated with the general relationship between a man and the spirits which control his world. A harmonious life depends on maintaining harmony among the unseen forces that control life. Spiritual Head gives tangible form to the idea of these life controlling forces.

               Perhaps most importantly than the example of Western artists' work, McEwen instilled in the workshop artists the modernist doctrine of the unique work of art. "He disliked copying and asked us to create something unique and new. He never told us what subjects to do but told us never to repeat" (Nicholas Mukomberanwa in Prominent Sculptors of Zimbabwe. Nicholas Mukomberanwa. p. 19).

               What is ultimately most significant about the achievement of Nicholas Mukomberanwa and many of his fellow artists, is that they have been able to take the best of what Frank McEwen so generously offered them--his knowledge and experience as an insider in the modernist experience--and by combining it with the core of their own experience produce a new tradition of African art. The debate over the so-called "European influence" is countered by the reality that, after forty years, the work of the sculptors of Zimbabwe interweaves traces of modernist style and technique with resonances of early Zimbabwean stone sculpture, and figures and themes drawn from the lives and beliefs of the artists themselves.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in Mukomberanwa's pieces that incorporate references to corn. From pre-Columbian carved terracotta figures of Chicomecoatl--the ancient Aztec Corn Goddess--to Nicholas Mukomberanwa's Heavy Responsibility (#15), lovingly fashioned from the dark, recalcitrant serpentine of Zimbabwe. Corn (or maize, or mealies as it is known in Africa), its nurture, and its harvest, has a rich iconography in peasant societies. It recurs in Mukomberanwa's work in many sculptures that enshrine corn as both food and seed of new life. The visitor to Mukomberanwa's compound of home, farm, and sculpture studio cannot escape its significance: over there, depending on the season, are the corn fields, the harvest, or members of the extended family at work converting the maize into cornmeal. A few hundred yards away in the outdoor studio, raised on its plinth, is a complex figure of pale-hued unwaxed stone, curved around the central form of an ear of corn. "It is the last one left" the artist explains "and he has to decide whether to eat it or to save the seed for next season's planting".

               Heavy Responsibility is a weighty piece, its form echoing the gravity of its content. A massive pair of arms enfold the precious ears of corn. The figure's head, less significant than its burden, is reduced in scale and drawn inward expressively by the tension created around the shoulders. The gravity of the work mirrors Mukomberanwa's response to the event which inspired it: "In 1992" he relates "I was very lucky to have a good harvest when three quarters of the country had drought. Lots of people came from different places to my farm to buy maize. What inspired me was when a man bought about 15 kilograms of grain and told me he had six children and was going to carry the grain a very long way to feed his family." It is clear how Mukomberanra's art and his life are intimately interconnected.

               He is also keenly aware of the challenges that face his society. Having lived through the perilous years of Zimbabwe's struggle for independence in the 1970s, Mukomberanwa now strives alongside his fellow Zimbabweans to rebuild. And he recognizes the role and labor of women in works like the powerful Weaver (#16), the beautifully curving forms of Bride (#2), and Proud Woman (#8). Perhaps most expressively Caught in a Storm ( ) a major work that has occupied Mukomberanwa for an extended time, pays homage to women in general and to motherhood in particular. Showing his understanding and appreciation of the depth of feeling in mother-child relationships, Mukomberanwa says: "I was trying to express the love of any mother in times of danger, in protecting her child".

               A conjunction of suggestive and descriptive elements keep Mukomberanwa's sculptures constantly alive. As we circle around them, they transform themselves before our eyes and evoke the intangible spirits--those "guardian angels"--that inform them. In the complex abstract form of Infinity (#11), the intractable stone has skillfully been made to curve in on itself and reveals neither beginning nor end. It becomes a metaphor for the mystery of the cosmos.

               Spiritual forces connected with bird forms are continually reinvented in Mukomberanwa's work. These can be linked to the bird figures of Great Zimbabwe, and, like the stylized Owl (#5), are powerful icons. In Water Birds (#10) the elegant long-bill of the bird is played off against the curved edge and wavy surface of a wing. At the same time the wing itself evokes both the water which supports the bird's life, and the rain which the bird's presence heralds. By virtuoso carving, the bill has been cut away completely from the stone in which it was embedded, creating a shadow that evokes the notion of the spirit world.                       

               Spiritual healers obtain their powers from water spirits, whose form Mukomberanwa envisions in Njuzu (#7). Here he has adapted a Picassoesque profile familiar from many late cubist paintings to suggest a presence that transcends the merely human. Trailing seaweedlike strands of hair the Njuzu or water spirits, glide below the waters in the pools and ponds where they live. Concentric ripples on the surface confirm their presence.

               Water is therefore a key element in Shona cosmology and creatures associated with water have special significance. So, as the artist explains, "Catching a fish in a dream is a good omen", and the marvelous giant fish with its fanned out tail that is displayed in Fisherman (#13) is a symbol neither of food nor of sport, but of the much more profound question of man's destiny.  

               In Man and His Shadow (#12) the identification of the shadow created in the hollow between the two forms is made clear. "I tried to express our belief in the Shona culture that every human being alive has a spirit from the day of birth", Mukomberanwa explains, "The hollow part of the sculpture represents the spirit". The Doppelgänger, man's invisible counterpart, occurs again in the elegant and sinuously outlined Man and His Spirit (#21) where duplicate rough and smooth forms echo each other to suggest substance and shadow. The finely incised chevron pattern placed vertically on the rough surface on the left, is recognizable as a trace of the patterning that occurs in traditional Shona woodcarving. Scholars have interpreted the chevron forms and concentric circles that predominate on wooden Shona headrests and other artifacts as references to traditional cosmology--the chevron a sign for the lizard or the python, the circle a reference to both crocodile eyes and the ripples that form in pools of water inhabited by the subterranean spirits. Mukomberanwa cognizant of this tradition deliberately incorporates these abstract patterns into his work where they serve both as decoration and symbol. In the skillful and minimal construction of this piece, which combines rough and smooth surfaces and sets the texture of those surfaces in tension with the fine lines that give them meaning, Mukomberanwa gives incontrovertible evidence of his mastery of material, form, and idea. A mastery which is uniquely and completely his own.

® Brenda Danolowitz

Henry Munyaradzi’s work has been characterized as “magic” by one of his fellow artists, the Zimbabwean sculptor Tapfuma Gutsa. It is a compelling metaphor. Like the finest and most sophisticated conjuring feats, Munyaradzi’s work is apparently seamless and therefore deceptively simple. With unerring sleight of hand the sculptor tweaks his unforgiving material into compelling and disarming objects. Munyaradzi creates sculptural objects, which are so finely balanced between a connection with reality and an innate abstraction that they never cease to fascinate or to reward the viewer. Not quite real, not quite abstract; honoring the often recalcitrant material while giving it fresh form; delicate and at the same time paradoxically powerful; often small in scale but always monumental; constantly walking the treacherous tightrope between what is descriptive and mundane on the one hand, and what is imaginative and otherworldly on the other, these works have earned their place in the pantheon of classic twentieth century art.

Munyaradzi’s recent death in Zimbabwe at the comparatively young age of sixty-seven has stilled the flow of his creative talents, but his work survives appropriately as a tribute to the undramatic life of a man of unquestionable artistic depth. As far as we know, Munyaradzi chose neither his material nor his life as an artist. They chose him when, in the late 1960s, he discovered, apparently by chance, the work of the burgeoning sculpture colony, which the indomitable Tom Blomfield had recently established at Tengenenge in the zimbabwean bush.

While many of today’s artists who work in stone use motorized tools to achieve their effects, Munyaradzi not only selected, hewed, and hand carried his material to his work station himself (as was routine for all Tengenenge artists), but he worked with hand tools, and it is worthwhile reminding ourselves of the laborious and loving process that went into each one of these fluid creations. For it is in this process of interacting and familiarizing himself with his material, of being led by it while maintaining firm control, that the artist succeeds in transforming stone, the creation of nature, into these animated and evocative, though frequently enigmatic, beings that are his art.

Sometimes they are human types, as in the perfectly expressive Hunchback where the deformation of the stone is sympathetically and subtly brought into synch with the idea of a less than perfect body. Both idea and material undergo one of Munyaradzi’s magical transformations. The hard stone becomes a misshapen body, while the potentially repellent crippled form is gently curved to suggest that even the most profound deformations can evoke a particular kind of beauty.

Or consider the familiar pairs of Mother and Child and Lovers.While the generic titles refer to a conventional lexicon, characteristic in Munyaradzi’s work, these labels belie their rich emotional content. The words are merely convenient referents. The harmonious intimacy of Mother and Child contrasts with the more tense juxtaposition of the two Lovers. In each case this is not simply a pair of figures with a label attached. The closeness of the mother-child relationship is underlined by the diagonal line that runs through the pair of tilted heads, almost, but not quite, aligning their four eyes. With a minimal adjustment of scale the mother’s head is signaled as the more dominant, the suggestion of her hair played off against the bald innocence of her child’s. And marvelously in such spare and geometricized forms, there is a nuanced hint of expression in the eyes denoting vigilance on the part of the mother, vulnerability in the child.

The Lovers are more upright, a device which immediately gives them a tension. Juxtaposed side by side the man (on the left) dominates in size and in his relative freedom from the surrounding stone. The female figure remains embalmed within the material, her delicate head immobile, her limbs pinned down. The unpolished textured surface of the serpentine, that clads her would-be body, throws into stark relief the dark polished surface of her fragile face. Close consideration of these works is its own reward. While Munyaradzi’s forms are simple and reduced their impact is far from simplistic or reductive.

At other times a play of pure from is what engages the artist. In Triangle Head, Watermelon Head and Spade Head, Munyaradzi tackles the material head on. He challenges it to retain its form while he chips away to accentuate that very form and to make it an integral part of his conception. Once again there is a give and take, interplay of artist and material, in which the artist’s respect for the stone is tempered by his creative will to give form to a unique idea. The carefully controlled and never obvious strategies that the artist has mastered to hold these two elements -- reality and artifice -- in tenuous suspension, is the substance of his magic.

In the thirty-some years of his long and fruitful career as a sculptor, Munyaradzi proved his mastery of that magic over and over. Never allowing his creations to slip into the formulaic and repetitive modes that separate the works of the master from those of his legion of imitators, the lively and empathetic forms that make up the world of Henry Munyaradzi are always fresh, always redolent of some previously unobserved aspect, always rewarding the open-eyed viewer by revealing new secrets.

Munyaradzi’s work was singled out early on, as his extensive exhibition history testifies. His work was exhibited widely right up until the time of his death. He was at the forefront of a generation of now famous Zimbabwean sculptors, carving out a path in the art world for a vibrant second wave of artists. His work has been seen and loved around the world for three decades, as comfortable and appealing in Paris, as in New York, London, or harare. His absence is acutely felt by artists and his public alike. But the one of Africa’s foremost modern artist’s remains ever present in his work.

© Brenda Danilowitz 1999