"Stone sculptures from Zimbabwe", Gallery ZAK, Fürth, Bavaria, 09.07. – 23.09.1999

[Fanizani Akuda (1932 – 2011)]    [Bernard Matemera (1946 – 2002)]  

Fürther Nachrichten, 12.07.1999, BARBARA KRAUPA

The flying woman

Impressive stone sculptures from Zimbabwe in the ZAK Gallery

Stone melting: Sculptor Eddie Masaya sculpturing at the workshop. Photo: Winckler



With his chisel Takawira has freed the woman. She is locked in a serpentine-stone, hidden in a rough unhewn block. Lazarus Takawira has recognized her and freed her from the stone. Now, the woman rushes out of the stone. She moves insanely fast and everyone knows her name: "Flying Woman".

The flying woman is part of an impressive collection of stone sculptures from Zimbabwe, which currently is on view in the Gallery ZAK in the Königstraße. Although the artworks in material and processing are very different from each other, they have one thing in common: they create the impression that they waited for the artist in the stone.



Tengenenge is the name of the sculptors-colony of which many of the pieces come from. At the foot of a mountain is the village in which an unprecedented triumph of stone carving began. Tengenenge art dealers from Japan, the United States and Europe are visiting. Tengenenge wins prices including the grand prize of the Venice Biennale, which the artist Nicholas Mukomberanwa had received.

Such a development no one believed would be possible, that the village with a lot of rocks became a village in which more and more agricultural workers sat to the ground and began to experiment with the stones. Founding father was a white tobacco dealer whose business was going so bad that he decided to devote himself entirely to his hobby of sculpting. By coincidence, also his black workers chiselled statues in stone. Blomefield, the tobacconist, recognised their immense talent.

Green and black serpentine is often used. Both materials belong to the hard stones and require tremendous patience and artistic skills, which is quite different from the fast-generated "Airport Art" for the tourists. They are polished with sandpaper and water and then inserted into hot wax, which gives them the characteristic lustre. The "Beggar" a sculpture by Anderson Mukomberanwa shows how the unpolished stone looks like: a dull, grey jacket envelops the figure.

Many of the works reflect the humour of their maker, the sculpture "Family riding on the back of an Elephant". If you look at the stone from the front you can see three heads in wind wheel arrangement. On the back they are the elephant on which they ride. Man transforms into his beast.



As a parallel event to the sculpture exhibition organised Eddie Masaya a sculptor workshop. The course started last Sunday and ends on 14 July. Masaya comes from Nyanga in Zimbabwe and showcased his work already in New York, Montreal and London.