Local artist in Venice

 Unlike the Minotaur of Greek mythology, which had the head of a bull and body of a man and demanded regular sacrifices of young Cretan men and women, the lugubrious black bull in Masamvu’s painting is straddled and weighed down by the headless body of a muscular white man clad in flower power tights.
Emerging from the bull’s spine like an alien monster is a green dragon whose scaly claws rest lightly on the man’s back.
When I met Masamvu last week at Village Unhu, the recently opened studio and gallery in Greengrove, he spoke about the spirituality of animals and their function and purpose in our lives.
“Communication with animals helps us sense danger, know when rain is likely to fall and to better understand our own human relationships” he said.
In the same way that owls are considered harbingers of bad news and hyenas are associated with witchcraft, various animals and birds affect our lives in different ways.
On a domestic level, the chicken symbolises family life, and at meal times a strict pecking order is observed. The father, as head of the family always eats the drumstick, while the mother makes do with the backbone. Children are given the chicken feet and head.
Masamvu’s symbolism, however, is not always easy to understand. His oil on canvas painting, No Headless Chicken portrays no domestic road runner; a disembodied human head, in the half human, half grotesque style of the late British artist, Francis Bacon, weighs down heavily on the chicken’s back as it disconsolately pecks the ground.
The troubled sleeper in Deferred Dreams (pictured above), also exhibited at the Venice Biennale, grips the bars of his iron bedstead.
Wrapped in a luscious black velvet throw patterned with vivid red leafy fronds that creep up his arms and across his face as he sleeps, we imagine that his dreams transport him from some harsh reality to a place of soft textures, beauty and comfort.
As in many of Masamvu’s  painterly compositions, a sinister element lurks close to the surface.
Born in Penhalonga just outside Mutare in 1980, Masamvu grew up in Marondera. Meeting with well known artist, Helen Lieros in 1999 was a turning point in his life, and every weekend for the next six years he studied art in Lieros’ studio, Gallery Delta, in Harare.
In 2005 he won a two-year scholarship to the Kunst Academy in Munich. Since returning to Zimbabwe in 2007 he has exhibited in galleries in Europe, Britain, West Africa and the Netherlands, and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in November at Blank Projects art gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town.
If Masamvu’s journey into art has made him a world traveller, the new studio, Village Unhu, will provide a base for inspiration and sharing ideas with many other successful and aspiring Zimbabwean artists.