‘The Body’ Well Worth Visiting

A room in the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) looks eerily like a graveyard… without graves. Alpheus Mvula’s stone sculptures stand on stools which make them seem suspended in the air and when you get a little bit closer, you realise that most of them are bodies. Voluptuous, stone structures of women and men.

Mostly without heads. Featuring 25 pieces made of soapstone and white marble, Alpheus Mvula’s exhibition of sculptures tellingly titled ‘The Body’ is currently on display in the main gallery of the NAGN.

Also displaying sculptures of cattle heads and the famed five headed bust depicting the founding father, President Hifikipunye Pohamba, Prime Minister Nahas Angula, Hage Geingob and Pendukeni Ithana as previously exhibited in ‘Oongombe’, the exhibition is an interesting showcase of Mvula’s ever increasing skill in sculpture which sees him meticulously coaxing creations out of solid rock.

The theme for this exhibition is the human form.

Not rendered with fidelity to the actual structure but carved out in Mvula’s own style which sees breasts and thighs become bulbous in contemplation of the feminine form in sculptures like ‘The Lady’.

Here Mvula sculpts a woman made entirely of white marble. Big breasted, large lipped and with legs open wide there is certainly something sexual about the sculpture and, as she is designed in a way that she is always lying on her back with her hair cascading past her shoulders, she seems to be a symbol of fertility, lust or both.

Though ‘The Lady’ does not quite live up to her name due to her suggestive pose, Mvula’s reverence for women can be seen in other depictions of the female such as the Bronze ‘Olutenda’ in which a clothed and headless woman stands tall and comparatively chaste in an undulating skirt.

The same quiet dignity exists in ‘The Body Posture’ in which Mvula fashions a headless woman who sits with her oversized hands neatly placed on her knees in a posture of grace.

For all the headless women in his exhibition, Alpheus does have one floating about perhaps for all.

‘The Face and the Flower’ is an intriguing sculpture in which a female face seems to exist in petals but has the odd quality of being dismembered despite being entirely beautiful, serene and seemingly made of sugar.

In ‘The Bath’ Mvula offers his most complete and delicate woman in his sculpture of a female modestly washing her naked self. Here the woman is upright, beautiful and stands tall in a piece that is beautiful and somewhat voyeuristic.

With regard to the men in ‘The Body’, there are a few. Though they can’t easily be identified for their baffling lack of penises in an exhibition where there are breasts and naked women galore.

Clothed and curious is the male form titled ‘The Boxer’ which depicts a fighter whose face is hidden behind his gloves. He is joined in manhood by a headless man in a suit and in various memberless torsos scattered around the room.

Though most of the forms in Mvula’s pieces are identifiable, there is a certain abstraction.

There is detail and skill but the pieces are highly stylised into great lumps that reveal their forms upon attention, particularly in his white soapstone pieces. Here the forms are harder to find and one has to search for limbs and chest and arms, though this search is not displeasing.

Most engaging in this hunt for forms is ‘Body in a Cows Head’ in which Mvula’s theme of cattle and the body meet as limbs are squashed into a cows head while the head itself mimics a headless torso with horns for arms.

Certainly absorbing and a novel experience due to the lack of sculpture exhibitions and public spaces in which to view local pieces in the country, ‘The Body’ is well worth visiting as a strange indoor yard filled with things that look like gravestones without graves and made of torsos.

Alpheus Mvula’s ‘The Body’ will be on display at the National Art Gallery of Namibia until 31 May.

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