Shona Sculpture - "A modern art movement founded on centuries of tribal culture"
The Shona tribe, from Zimbabwe in Africa, are world-renowned
for their skill in transforming rock into beautiful works of art.
Each piece is painstakingly created using simple hand tools and
the skills handed down by generations. The stone sculptures produced
by these artists display great individuality of form and content.
Every piece is an original and an investment for the astute collector.
Shona Art is powerfully and superbly human, with
so much of the work portraying messages in a figurative and forcefully
abstract style, carved with immense skill, it cannot help but to
convey mankind's basic feelings and experiences to everyone, no
matter what their cultural heritage. This art is both extremely
seductive and shatteringly beautiful. The stone alone with it's
amazing variety of colours and textures, of soft and hard multicoloured
stone invites you to explore and to touch, visually, emotionally
and mentally.
Most important of all, this art is truthful to
the stone and to the ideals and subjects with which the artists
work, the sculptors not only have an intensive technical knowledge
and understanding of the stone, but also a great spiritual respect
for this natural resource, which they believe, like all other things
around them, has an innate spiritual life force of its own.
Although many of the beliefs can seem complex to
western cultures, in Shona Sculpture the artist expresses the fundamental
relationships between the two guiding forces in Shona life - the
visible physical world and the unseen spiritual world that exists
in all cultures, but in Shona culture represents very influential
ancestral spirits who are communicators between the dead and the
living.
The strengths of these remarkable sculptures help
to establish the reasons for their success in communicating directly
and successfully to a varied and demanding international public.
|
