Guiding Ancestral Spirit

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Home > Zimbabwe Shona Sculpture > Garden

Guiding Ancestral Spirit

Item Id: 64246

Artist: Henry Munyaradzi

Medium: Chiweshe Serpentine

Dimensions; height: 65", width: 19", depth: 16", weight: 650lbs

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$68,000.00

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Description

Known simply as "Henry", Henry Munyaradzi is the poet laureate of Zimbabwe Sculpture. Born in the northern Guruve region of Zimbabwe in 1931, he began sculpting after meeting Tom Blomefield at Tengenenge in 1967. The essence of Henry's work came from the shape of the stone itself, from which Henry drew inspiration and imagination. His work is characterized by intersecting, flat rectangular shapes, circular forms, cones, spheres, and cylinders, all harmoniously related. Prior to his death in 1998, Henry achieved remarkable success internationally with solo and group exhibitions all over the world. Entirely self-taught, his skill has amazed artists and art lovers all over the world.Henry Munyaradzi's background, like his life and work, is as deceptively simple as it is remarkable. His father, a spirit medium, left the family when Henry was very young. Yet Henry's childhood and upbringing was typical of rural Zimbabwe at the time - herding cattle and hunting game with dogs, spears and bows and arrows. He did not go to school and spoke very little English. He eventually worked in various ways with the natural land and industry around him - first as a village blacksmith and later as a carpenter and tobacco grader.However, this similarity with his peers ended in 1967 when, out of work, he stumbled across the Tengenege Sculptors' Community set up by Tom Blomefield. Ignoring the presence of other artists, he preferred his individual strengths and powerfully original imagery. As a result, he quickly established himself as the leading artist of Tengenenge. His work was included in major exhibitions early in his career - his first exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, for example, was in 1968. Since that time he has been exhibited both in group and individual shows worldwide. In 1975 he left Tengenenge to work on his own. Following a very successful one-man exhibition in London in 1984, he was able to purchase his own farm, where he worked and gained inspiration from the rural surroundings.The strength of his work lies in his purity of form - technique and imagery are honed down to pinpoint the essence of his subject in the simplest of terms. The confident lines and clear-cut geometric incisions have often been compared to Klee (an artist of whom Munyaradzi was unfamiliar) - but these his love for a finished product of great beauty and calm were present in his work from the very beginning. His subject matter came from the natural world, and only the intimate knowledge of this world could produce such minimal, but precise, expression. Being entirely self-taught, his work blends the simplicity of the primitive with stylized sophistication. He greatly respected the stone he used and was often inspired by its original shape. It was an intense relationship with the material as he worked spontaneously, neither drawing nor measuring.Despite its apparent simplicity, the work cannot be reproduced. Henry expressed his themes of contemplation, nature, and spirit in new ways, but also with his personal Apostolic faith. Contemplation of stories in the Bible provided Munyaradzi with powerful imagery of supplication, friendship, family ties and the security of paternal protection.Henry Munyaradzi participated in almost all the major seminal Shona group exhibitions, including the "Les Magiciens de la Terre" at the Beaubourg center in Paris, as well as eight one-man shows in London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Heidelberg and Harare. His work is found in the Permanent Collections of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Chapungu Sculpture Park and in museums such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Rodin Museum in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in NY, and The Museum of Mankind in London, as well as in many prestigious private collections throughout the world.Henry began his sculpting career and was acclaimed "...that of the leading ten sculptor-carvers in the world perhaps five come from Zimbabwe." And Henry led the top five. - Daily Telegraph, London. For 26 years, Spirits In Stone Galleries has been at the forefront of what Newsweek in 1987 called "the most important art form to emerge from Africa in this Century." And Henry was our family friend and mentor.