Biography
Tinashe Makaza was born in 1980 and belongs to the youngest generation of sculptors in York’s Shona Gallery’s representation. He came of age as Zimbabwe’s 2000s economic crisis disrupted cultural life profoundly, and his formation as an artist was shaped by conditions of scarcity and uncertainty that his predecessors in the tradition did not face in the same acute form.
Makaza’s work is formally adventurous within the Shona tradition — pushing shapes further toward abstraction, engaging with negative space more aggressively, allowing roughness of surface where earlier generations sought smoothness. These are considered decisions: an artist testing the boundaries of an inherited form.
“Makaza is asking what the Shona tradition can say in the twenty-first century — not by abandoning it but by pressing against its edges, finding where the ancient forms meet contemporary experience.”
— York’s Shona Gallery, notes on the collection
Historical Context
The question of tradition and innovation is one every artist inherits from their predecessors. In the Shona sculptural tradition, this question has particular weight: the tradition was founded on a myth of authentic continuity with ancient Zimbabwean stone-carving practices, and that myth has been both enabling and constraining for successive generations.
Makaza’s generation is less invested in this founding myth. Growing up with access to global art cultures, familiar with contemporary sculpture from beyond Africa, they bring a more self-aware and selective relationship to the Shona inheritance. What Makaza is working toward is a form rooted in the Shona tradition without being bounded by it — work that carries the material gravity of Zimbabwean stone while speaking to the concerns of a global contemporary art conversation.
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