Born in 1962 in Chinhoyi, began sculpting under mentor Bernard Takawira

Norbert Shamurarira has passed through many stages in life, and in his sculptures covered a wide range of human emotions, ranging from grief and sadness to joy and hope. This range of emotion is represented in his sculptures. So here is sculpture which tugs at our heart strings and uplifts our souls. Artistically, he makes a feature of darkly polished stone, setting a somber mood for those sculptures which deal with the grief and pain he has gone through on the death of close family relatives. But this surface of the stone is used to good effect in sculptures which deal with the brighter side of life and his healthy appreciation of female beauty.

Shamurarira is a middle generation sculptor. Like many other middle generation sculptors he has broken new ground within his tradition in by passing the spiritually contained sculptures of the early artists, He has moved on to a different world, a world dominated more by social issues and striving for their solutions than a world which sees these solutions arrived at through religious faith, or in the case of traditional Africa, the placation of ancestral and other spirits.

His sculptures today reflect his more optimistic approach to life, a delight in nature, in every day things, in the fleeting beauty of passing women, in the nobility of people who serve others. The monochrome surfaces bring out the clear lines of his sculptures; there is no worked surface, no dependency on the decorative or aesthetic qualities of the stone. The actual stone is a quiet presence in his work. More prominence is given to the subject matter of his pieces -the concerns of his own life, today less morbid than in the past, less onerous.

Norbert Shamurarira is a sculptor of many parts, many moods and many obsessions. But what emerges in all his work is the purity of his forms, the accuracy for example by which he presents the structure of a woman?s face, the slender column of her neck, the gentle slope of her shoulders. Now in mid-life, Shamurarira, living and working in Chitungwiza, is a man who having seen too much, and explores the formal qualities of his sculpture, particularly the relationship between mass and space. His stones remain dark and unrelenting, but there is a new beauty to his work today, a new interest in making sculpture of considerable artistic appeal, rather than sculpture which depicts the darker areas of his life. He has gained international recognition for the formal acumen of his work, and the containment of a wide spectrum of human feelings in his sculptures.