Protecting the Spirits

Henry Munyaradzi

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SKU:: HEN1485
UPC:
Dimensions:: 40" x 31" x 15"
Weight:: 475
Materials:: Green Serpentine

Artist Info: Optional

Henry Munyaradzi

Henry was born in 1931 in the North of Zimbabwe.  With no schooling, he spent his childhood herding cattle and hunting game with spears, bows and arrows.  For many years he held jobs as a blacksmith, carpenter and tobacco grader.   He began sculpting in 1967 and went by the name of Henry of Tengenege.  Henry now boasts more international exhibits, more awards and distinctions, and more admirers than any other Zimbabwe sculptor.

His work is based on simple uncluttered form and makes a bold and powerful statement... it’s as uncontrived as you can get, yet as sophisticated as anything you will find anywhere.  It is spontaneous, elegant, original, yet unmistakably contemporary and modern in every respect.   When asked about the inspiration for his work Henry replies, “I look at the stone and see how it is.  Sometimes I see in the stone a lion, an owl, a man, a sheep.  Sometimes if I start and the theme isn’t successful I’ll leave the stone and take another.  The things I see in Zimbabwe I sculpt.”

Henry Munyaradzi approaches stone as if smoothing a troubled brow or using a cool hand to relieve fever.  Henry takes the edge of the heat off the stone, gently and firmly removes it from the natural world and establishes its primacy as art.  Henry’s is unmistakably contemporary.  His work has more relevance as art than as an aspect of Shona cultural practice.  The issues dealt with are issues of style, the truth to materials, and the power of the surface.

To Henry nature is not inanimate, it has a mind of its own and possible powers of reason.  Thus, he ascribes to nature as well as animals and bird, facial features, eyes to see with and mouths to speak.  These are indicated by horizontal lines, vertical lines, and circular incisions in the stone.  Highly expressive, they take on the guise of the subject and often convey meaning more fully than form.  Often the iconography is based upon Christianity, displaying the simplicity and conviction of a good and unquestioning believer.  They have little sense of hallmark, and sometimes provide the subject with its most distinguished feature.  It is possible through these ideograms to make a two dimensional as well as a three dimensional reading of subject and see Henry to be as much a graphic artist as a sculptor, with a new and less ephemeral material than paper.

Henry speaks little about his work.  He allows us to say what we feel about it and feel what we like about it, to establish meaning for ourselves and even to impart to it a subject of our own choice  Our feelings about his work are as important to Henry as they are to ourselves, and this is part of the caring and sharing which is the basis of Henry’s sculpture.

Henry Munyaradzi’s sculptures are in private collections all over the world.  His exhibitions have won him well-deserved accolades in the world of contemporary art.  His work makes an artistic statement of quiet elegance that is not easily forgotten.  Henry passed away in 1998 .

EXHIBITIONS:

1968   		‘New African Art’ - The Central African Workshop School
          		Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Toured American Cities
1969   		‘Contemporary African Arts’ - Camden Art Centre, London
1970   		‘Sculptures Contemporaines de Vukutu’, Musee d’Art, Moderne de la Ville de Paris
1971   		‘Sculpture Contemporaines des Shona d’Afrique’, Musee Rodin, Paris
1972   		Museum of Modern Art, New York, U.S.A.
1979   		‘Kunst auf Africa’, Berlin, Staatlichen Kunsthalle went to Bremen and Stockholm
1979   		Gallerie Duende, Munchen
1979   		Feingarter Gallery, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
1980   		Feingarter Gallery, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
1981   		‘Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture’, London
1981   		Bav X1 Gallery, Toronto
1981   		‘Kunst Aus Zimbabwe’, Galerie Kariba Arts, Cologne
1981   		‘Art from Africa’, Commonwealth Institute, London
1982   		Janet Fleischer Gallery, Philadelphia
1982   		‘Tengenenge Sculpture’, Partners in Progress, Berlin
1982   		‘Tengenenge Sculpture’, Hanwerk Messer, Munich
1983   		‘Stein Sculpturen Aus Zimbabwe’, Frankfurt
1983   		‘Tengenenge Sculpture’, California
1983   		‘Spirit of Zimbabwe’, Institute of Directors, London
1983   		Africa Centre, London
1983   		‘Tengenenge Sculpture Exhibition’, International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C.
1984   		‘Stein Sculpture Aus Zimbabwe’, Bayerische Vereinsbank (4 exhibitions) West Germany
1984   		‘Stein Sculpture Aus Zimbabwe’, Frankfurt
1984   		‘Art in Action’, Waterperry House, Oxford
1984   		‘Shona Sculpture Uit Zimbabwe’, Pulchri Studio, The Hague
1984   		Hyatt Hotel, San Antonio
1984   		Plazzotta Studios, Chelsea, London
1984   		Sutton Place, Guilford, United Kingdom
1984  		 ‘Henry of Tengenenge’, Commonwealth Institute, London
1985  		 ‘Henry of Tengenenge’, Feingarten Gallery, Los Angeles
1985   		‘Kunstachatze Aus Africa’, Frankfurt
1985   		‘Stein Sculpture Aus Zimbabwe’, Vienna
1985   		‘Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture’, Kresge Art Museum, U.S.A.
1986   		Africa Centre, London
1986   		‘Shona Sculpture’, Margam Castle, Wales
1986   		‘Moderne Sculpture Aus Zimbabwe’, Tabak Museu, Vienna
1986   		‘Soul in Stone’, Irving Gallery, Perth
1986   		‘Soul in Stone’, Sydney
1986   		Linda Loma Gallery, California
1987   		‘Soul in Stone’, Brisbane
1987   		African Influence Gallery, Boston
1989		The Gallery Shona Sculpture, Chapungu Village, Harare

Group Exhibitions:

1968-An Exhibition of Rhodesian Sculpture, Durban art Gallery, South Africa
1969-New African Art, the African workshop School
          Twelve years of Rhodesian talent, national Gallery, Harare
          Contemporary African Arts, Camden Art Centre, UK
1970-Gallery 2, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe
            Sculptures Contemporeign de Vukutu
1971-Union of Jewish Woman, Harare
1973-Tengenenge sculpture, standard banks Gallery, John Boyne House, 
           Zimbabwe
1989-Henry Munyaradzi, Les magicians de la Terre, France
           Shona sculpture, Robert Steele Gallery, Australia
1990-Contemporary African artists, changing tradition, the Studio 
           Museum in Harlem, New York, USA
1991- Spirit in Stone, the Cleverland Museum of Natural History
1992-Stone Sculpture, Zimbabwe Pavilion, expo 92, Sevilla, Spain
           Timeless spirit in Stone, Barbara Ackerma Gallery, USA
1994-Tengenenge Community Gallery
1997-Zimbabwe Stone sculpture, National Botanical Institute, south Africa
1998- Zimbabwe, Stewen Getuggenisse, Belgium
2001-Seele in Stein, museum Alpin, Chapungu, Royal Botanical Gardens kew, London, UK

Workshops and Artist residences:

Worked in Tengenenge, Chitungwiza and Ruwa where he bought a Farm.

Awards and Achievements:

1983-Winner Nedlaw sculpture Exhibition, National Gallery, Harare
A Work by Henry depicted in a stamp issue of Commonwealth day, 14 March
Commemorative stamps, PTC, Zimbabwe
1986-prime Minister bestows special awards for outstanding contributions to the sculpture movement, Thomas Mukarobwa, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Henry Munyaradzi

Collections:

•	National Gallery, Zimbabwe
•	Chapungu Soul Park, Zimbabwe
•	Beit giogin Trust collection, South Africa
•	McEwen collection, The British museum, UK
•	Collection Seddon Pearce4, UK
•	National Gallery, Botswana, phoniex
•	M John McFadden, New York, USA
•	Feingarten Gallery, USA
•	Tabark Museum, Vienna, Austria
•	Uniliver headquarters, Rosterdam, the Netherlands, Tengenenge Museum
•	Caf Meyer gallery collection, Belgium
•	Collection Kleine gunk, Germany
•	Collection Manfred Kuhnigic, Bad Soda, Germany
•	Collection Olivier Sultan, France
•	Collection Patrick Ranoux, France
•	Collection Domique Gibert, france
•	The Joseph G Raeber collection, Dornach, Switzerlanl
•	Phoenix Art Museum, U.S.A.
•	Volkerkunde Museum, Frankfurt, West Germany
•	Feingarten Gallery, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
•	Tabak Museum, Vienna, Austria

REMEMBERING HENRY

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.

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