Bernard Matemera, 1946–2002
Born in 1946 in Guruve, Zimbabwe, Bernard Matemera is a founder member of Tengenenge and has long been the symbolic leader of the community.
His uncompromising and powerful images are now found in public and private collections throughout the world. Matemera is acknowledged as one of Zimbabwe’s master sculptors. He spent his entire professional career at Tengenenge, where he became a figurehead among the artists.
As a child, Matemera showed great talent at wood carving and enjoyed traditional rural crafts such as modelling clay. Like many of today’s master sculptors, it was Tom Blomefield and the Tengenenge community who introduced him to stone carving — a turning point that shaped his life.
Matemera quickly developed an individual and powerful style that he maintained through years of exploration, hardship and success. His work is often demanding of international audiences, as its strong African imagery and subject matter take time to fully absorb. Animals, spirits, people and dream-creatures have provided him with subject matter throughout his career.
F. Mor, author of *Shona Sculpture*, describes Matemera’s work as:
“His African neo-expressionism, often represented in enormous and deliberately grotesque dimensions, oscillates between the humorous and the tragic.”
Many of his subjects bear the mysterious trademark of three toes and three fingers — a recurring element in his dreams, but also a real physiological trait found among a community he knew well. Matemera remained in Tengenenge throughout the war of Independence, faithful to his beliefs and cultural heritage.
Celia Winter-Irving, respected critic and expert on Zimbabwean stone sculpture, wrote: “There is in these sculptures an unspent power and a reserve of energy. They speak both of the force within them and the force behind them… They are indeed a celebration of the monumental.”
In the last years of his life, Matemera received tremendous critical acclaim, including a prestigious award at the New Delhi Triennial in 1986 and first prize in the Annual Heritage Exhibition at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
His sculptures — animals, spirits, people and metamorphic beings — remain deeply tied to his dreams and imagination. Notable works include *Blind Man*, *Great Spirit Woman*, *The Man Who Ate His Totem*, and *Chapungu*.
Highly acclaimed, Bernard Matemera has been described as one of the greatest stone sculptors of our time.
source: “Chapungu – Custom and Legend” (2001), R. Guthrie and “Sculptors from Zimbabwe”, B. Joosten