Kivuthi MBUNO
(1947) [view
available works from this artist]
Kivuthi Mbuno was born
in Kenya in the year 1947. He is an recognized master
of the international art scene. His works were exhibited
in very important museums and private galleries in Europe
(Saatchi Collection, London, Germany) and in the United
States (Center for African Art, New York).
In his early days, Kivuthi
Mbuno worked as a chief on Safaris, which led him to travel,
primarly into the interior of Kenya and Tanzania. This
is how he came to know nature and its wild fauna and to
mantain a close relationship with them that was to mark
him deeply. In 1976, his ties with the family of baroness
Karen Blixen (better known under her nome de plume,
Isaac Dinesen) led him to settle in Langata, where,
from then on, he devoted himself exclusively to drawing.
These lenghty treks inland as well as the traditional
life of the Wakamba tribe, from which he comes, have inspired
him. Mbuno gives himself to nature and shows us the extraordinary
in what is common place. In a precise drawing style -
using ink, color pencils, and pastels - he combines animals,
humas, objects of traditional life and huge spaces. This
is his vocabulary, and it has not changed in almost 20
years.
Here the vast territories
of Africa have none of that hostile aspects usually ascribed
to them. Kivuthi Mbuno transports us into a peaceable
and luminous world that yields itself up to any activity.
For Kivuthi Mbuno the sparkle of his world is percetible
in places where we do not ordinary notice it. Animals
(gazelles, giraffes, hyienas, elephants, snakes, birds)
ceaselessly play with their morphological characteristics
( the giraffes long neck, the powerful elephants trunk,
and so far) in this nature in which they apropriate their
respective territory in perfect harmony with the other
animals. Only mankind might appear as the disturbing element.
But there, too, Mbuno decks them out with characteristics
that are at one and the same time grotesque and elegant:
they move about with the same ease as the animals they
are hunting. Shining through their very singular faces
are the spiritual characteristics of shrewd, pleasure-seeking,
enjoyful people.
The
model in the artist's mind comes closer to the supernatural
than to the natural. We would be wrong to believe in one
ancestral vision or to see in this work the mark of primitive
naivete. The artist himself explains that what
he wants to paint is less the reality than the idea he
has of nature in a sort of eden-like era. For Kivuthi
Mbuno, beauty merges with the lovely harmony of people
with their natural environment, and he feels that this
way of being in the world might be called "being
inside beauty".
source: "Contemporary Art of Africa",
A. Magnin; "Contemporary African Art from the Jean
Pigozzi collection", Sotheby's
Selected
Exhibitions
Kivuthi Mbuno
GALLERY
Kivuthi Mbuno
with one of his latest works (c) 2006
