Tendai Mukomberanwa

Zimbabwe, 1974

BiographyBorn in 1974 as the son of one of the country’s renowned and well-respected sculptors of the First Generation, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Tendai started sculpting at a tender age of 10 with much encouragement and nurturing by his family. His first sculptures were small Steatite heads seldom influenced by the strong and powerful facial imagery of his father’s work. He then experimented on the harder Serpentine and enlarged the magnitude of his works as well as carving fully in the round. A graduate of the Somona State University in California, United States of America, Tendai further sharpened his sculpting skills in his Fine Arts Bachelor’s major. During this period he mixed and mingled with people of various backgrounds who positively influenced his growth in sculpting. Tendayi has put a new challenge upon himself: to stay true to the Zimbabwean – Shona – tradition in sculpting and use his training in the Western contemporary art to open up new paths, where these two “poles” melt into each other and result in a new style, new subject matters, new ideas, such as “A Spiritual Touch of the Hand”, which is a big sculpture of the print of a hand, as if a giant had put his hand on the stone and left his handprint, and then in the upper right corner you suddenly discover a small face, symbolizing the spiritual side of the subject.

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