SHONA SCULPTURE (Zimbabwe)

African sculpture, generally speaking, has a noble and ancient tradition. The subject of an extensive literature, it has left us, over the course of the centuries, with works that today enrich many of the world's museums. It developed mainly in the western part of the continent, in the countries along the Gulf of Guinea, with very rare traces in southern Africa. This was the result not of a higher degree of intellectual or cultural evolution, but of different historical and geographical conditions.

The finest production, predominantly in wood and sometimes with polychrome decorations, usually consists of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, with copious variations on the mask. Recurrent characteristics are the tendency towards abstraction, the intensity of expression, certain surrealistic aspects, and in general the surpasssing of naturalism and content in the pursuit of purely stylistic values. This was the case even though the aim of such sculpture was not autonomous (art for art's sake) but instrumental (practical or religious).

Art centres of some interest still exist in Africa, even beyond the above-mentioned region (in Angola and Mozambique, for instance). Here, within the limits of their traditions, the artists follow their own paths with their own developments and variations.

Shona sculpture differs from this framework in that it is an independent and isolated artistic movement, the most recent and also the most interesting in the contemporary era - and not only on the continent of Africa. It attracts attention for its original and unmistakeable style; for the sudden and commanding way in which it arose without any specific heritage; for the vast array of artists who have contributed to it over the past forty years; for its exuberance of expression; for the diversification of the artists' imagination; for the lack of enslavement of the concept of art to a rite or to any other obedience, either practical or theoretical.

Shona sculpture represents pure longing for life and form. It is an innate art, immune from the corrosive intellectualism and morbid introspection of our times, and from all the other factors which usually cover the inspirational void. We find ourselves in front of a vigorous impulse that attacts the hostile rocks, evokes the natural forms of the environment, seeks the mysteries that animate it, and desires to encounter the spirits of the divinities that reveal themselves in the creative act. But we also find ourselves in front of the surpassing of the ethnic element, of the descriptive tribal component, of the figure or mask that has often degenerated into mass-produced craft which satisfies tourists' facile tastes for the exotic. It is African sculpture that nonetheless unconsciously expresses itself in modern terms.

'Shona Sculpture' - F. Mor