It is more than two years since Nicholas Mukomberanwa's distinctive sculpture was last seen in New York. In this latest exhibition of work done since 1996, the doyen of African artists once again serves up an astonishing visual feast of powerful form and nuanced surface delights. Whether intent on seducing the gaze with the smooth black surfaces of highly polished stone in works like The Thinker. Braiding Her Hair and Women, or on juxtaposing dark areas of polished stone with its lighter rough unpolished state in The Kiss, Watching II, Sekura and Chief's Messenger, Mukomberanwa is always very firmly in control of his medium and confident of where he wants it to lead him.
His works have frequently celebrated the power and fortitude of women. Young Girl, Women and Braiding Her Hair evoke different aspects of femininity. The taut slimness of the elongated form of Young Girl suggests the supple elasticity of a youthful body. The intimate pairing of heads, one young, one older, in the iconic Women, underscores the notion of mutual support that gives a palpable strength to both forms. And the complexity of composition in the intertwined torsos and arms of Braiding Her Hair are echoed in the cascading curves of the hair itself. In this work, the combination of undulating sensuous curves and angular powerful limbs--seen clearly in the exaggerated form of the dominant hand in the lower part of the work--act as a metaphor for the paradoxical simultaneity of softness and strength that epitomizes the most positive characterizations of women. In this compelling work the eye is constantly drawn from the still aspect of the two heads to the activity of the hands and back again, and the viewer becomes involved in a duality of passive and active female power.
The Thinker is Mukomberanwa's interpretation of a familiar theme. Here the compact treatment of form is enlivened in the frontal view by the crisscrossing of legs and arms which set up a movement that works in counterpoint to the weighty form. Unlike Rodin's famously introspective and tortured thinker, Mukomberanwa's version subtly directs its gaze upwards, and suggests that inspiration comes both from within and from some higher outside source.
This fits well with Mukomberanwa's stated belief that corporeal man exists in tandem with a spiritual self, a being so omnipresent that the sculptor has no trouble embodying it in stone in Spiritual Man. This almost abstract elongated form carries the mere suggestion of "man" in the raised shelf of a nose, small mouth, and rudimentary eye--a vestigial scratch in the surface of the stone--this whiff of humanity is sufficient to transform the solid mass of stone into a spirit-being.
The Third Eye with its rhythmic repetition of contour is another reference to the spirituality that is immanent in man. The Kiss - like Thinker a theme with noteworthy predecessors, this time in both Rodin and Brancusi--is a further example of the economy with which Mukomberanwa can evoke an emotion if he so chooses. Here Mukomberanwa rivals the abstraction of Brancusi and brings it up to date. Unlike Women whose features, though stylized, are clearly demarcated, in The Kiss the sculptor relies on an opposition of light and dark achieved through unpolished and polished stone to evoke the silent intimacy of the kiss. The emotion is felt rather than described as the work is be apprehended as a suggestive abstraction.
Economy and abstraction are likewise the key to Owl. In earlier work Nicholas Mukomberanwa frequently depicted animal and bird forms that are the embodiments of ancestral spirits in Shona culture. The birds in particular are also references to early Zimbabwean history and the famous stone birds of the Great Zimbabwe ruins. In this exhibition, Owl takes up this theme in a suggestive minimalist depiction in which the bird is recognized by composed of two half circles at right angles to one another which gives them the appearance of being wide open in owl fashion-are all that is needed to transform the smooth, elegant, other wise undifferentiated stone into the image of a bird.
Brenda Danilowitz is an art historian, curator, and indepentdent scholar of African art. From 1980 to 1986 she was a faculty member in the Department of History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She has given courses at a number of univeristies in the United States, including Yale and the University of Connecticut, and has contributed articles and reviews to African Arts and numerous other publications, Since 1990 she has been curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Copyright 1998 All Rights Reserved.