n his hands, a Shona proverb becomes an object you can walk around: memory and transformation assembled from what the city throws away.
Victor Nyakauru (b. 1977, Zimbabwe) trained at the Visual Art Studios of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe between 2004 and 2007, and later returned to the institution as a sculpture instructor at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe School of Visual Art and Design, contributing to the formation of the country's younger generation of artists.
Nyakauru is known above all for his use of found and discarded materials. His sculptures combine stone, metal, wood, bone, plastic, leather and other recovered objects, transforming them into figurative and zoomorphic compositions: an alchemy, as Zimbabwean critics have written, that assembles the discarded and breathes life into it. Where many of his contemporaries pursue abstraction or esoteric symbolism, Nyakauru holds fast to figurative representation, and the effect is disarming: the viewer's disbelief falls away before a loaf of bread cast in concrete, "Bread and Butter Issues", which won him the PPC first prize in 2018, or before creatures assembled from bone and leather. His practice draws on Zimbabwean oral traditions, Shona proverbs (tsumo), folklore and contemporary urban life, using familiar cultural references to address social experience, memory and transformation.
His recognitions form one of the fullest award records of his generation in Zimbabwe: two NAMA Awards, two PPC Awards, two National Gallery Outstanding Awards, an ILO award for outstanding mixed-media work, a residency at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2009), followed by the solo exhibition "Creatures / Tuzvipuka", and the Robert Sterling Clark Fellowship for African Artists, which took him to Vermont, USA (2011); in 2015 his mixed-media sculpture "Hopeful Migrants" received a special mention of the jury at Gallery Delta's exhibition on migration. His international activity includes the International Sculpture Symposium in Incheon, South Korea (2014), Hong Kong's first Afrocentric exhibition (2017) and the double presentation "Art360 Zimbabwe / Upstream" between Harare and Hong Kong (2018). In 2023 he was named overall winner of the inaugural Zimbabwe Visual Arts Awards with "Mukomberanwa", a work whose Shona title evokes unity and togetherness: a victory that carried his selection for the 60th Venice Biennale, where in 2024 he took part in the Zimbabwe Pavilion "Undone" at Santa Maria della Pietà, curated by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa and commissioned by Raphael Chikukwa, alongside Gillian Rosselli, Kombo Chapfika, Moffat Takadiwa, Sekai Machache and Troy Makaza, presenting the works "Chikwezvero", "Pfimbi yeNhimbe", "Ziva Kwawakabva" and "Maponde Anoyera". The same year his work, including "Theatre of Dreams" (2024), was presented by First Floor Gallery Harare at FNB Art Joburg. His work "Berejena" entered the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe after receiving major national recognition in 2008, and documentation concerning his career is held in the Warren M. Robbins Library at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. He lives and works in Harare.