"An alchemist who assembles discarded objects and breathes life into them."
Victor Nyakauru (b. 1977, Zimbabwe) is a mixed-media artist and sculptor based in Harare, among the leading figures of Zimbabwean found-object sculpture. Trained at the Visual Art Studios of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2004-2007), where he later taught sculpture, he combines stone, metal, wood, bone, plastic and leather into figurative and zoomorphic compositions rooted in Shona proverbs (tsumo), folklore and contemporary urban life. Winner of the inaugural Zimbabwe Visual Arts Awards (2023) with "Mukomberanwa", he took part in the Zimbabwe Pavilion "Undone" at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). A Robert Sterling Clark Fellow (2011), recipient of two NAMA Awards and two PPC Awards, he is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and documentation of his career is preserved in the Warren M. Robbins Library of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. He lives and works in Harare.