Arthur Manyengedzo was born in 1979 in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe, into a family of four. His parents divorced when he was young, so he grew up with his mother’s family. He started doing art at the age of ten, molding clay figurines and clay pots, then moved on to stone sculpting in his early teens.
When Arthur was nineteen, he started sculpting as an apprentice with Locardia Ndandarika, the wife of the late Joseph Ndandarika, one of the founding fathers of the Shona sculpture movement. He was inspired by his close friend Ronnie Dongo, son of Joseph Ndandarika.
Authur worked with Ronnie for a year and then started out on his own. He moved to the Chapungu Gallery in Harare where he sculpted side by side with Dino Baradza and Ignatius Zhuwakiyi who served as his mentors. He is now living and working at the Chitungwiza Art Centre, near the capital Harare.
At first, Arthur sculpted only figures, born out of love of his wife, but then he moved into the world of the abstract which he says he found a perfect medium to channel his thoughts and energies. Arthur Manyengedzo describes the feeling he pours into his sculptures as a “kind of calling”, but then he also draws on his imagination.
His shapes have an incredible natural cadence, belying the heaviness of the stone, and always seem to be spiraling upwards towards the sky. His preferred medium is Springstone, but he also enjoys Green Opal and prides himself on finishing his artworks with a degree of precision and polish that is rare among contemporary Zimbabwean stone sculptors.
Arthur was the 2008 artist-in-residence at the ZimArt Rice Lake Gallery outside Toronto, and the featured artist at RWAVHI's Johannesburg Gallery exhibition ‘FACES’ in 2016.
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