The Schlosspark Schwetzingen near Mannheim is a pearl among the baroque gardens in Germany.

But until shortly before mid-October it is now a garden of the world.

Fifty monumental sculptures from Zimbabwe, some of them up to three meters high, of the Shona people to be more precise, stand under the murmuring title "Chapungu" next to and opposite the traditional, white-framed Baroque groups and statues.

And fortunately they don't start a well-intentioned "dialogue", relate to each other or transform Renaissance Madonnas into African mothers with children, but are simply strangers, don't curry favor and force you to learn from the strangeness.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Even the famous students of the Black Continent, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, did not look for the familiar in their studies of African masks and sculptures, but rather for the completely different, incomprehensible and thus invented modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century.

European modernism comes from Africa

If the visitor begins the journey to the still unknown continent at the large castle lake of Schwetzingen, he comes across the starting point declared by the curators Roy Guthrie and his wife Marcellina Mushore: the high regard for old age in African culture.

The three wise "storytellers", huge, elongated heads made of dark stone, look at nature with alert eyes - and at the same time communicate with each other without words.

Although none of the fifty smoothly polished sculptures shown has artificially roughened skin or body surfaces, neither do these three sages, one instinctively senses their intended age;

For the village elders, the sculptor Wonder Luke does this subtly by leaving the broken edge of the back of the head, where the iron-rich rock has oxidized particularly badly over the years, unpolished in the middle one, so that the back part shimmers like henna-red hair.

The elements in stone that are often hidden from the outside, such as corroding iron oxide, which European sculptors almost only include in abstract sculpture, such as Ulrich Rückriem with his sophisticated plate tectonics and his wedge holes left open with visible traces of oxidation, are seen as processual in Zimbabwe's sculpture pictorial means of the composition are used consciously.

The second is the stone material itself: Zimbabwe, as a land of natural beauties such as the Victoria Falls or the ancient stone monument Masvingo, is truly "stone-rich" - and every rock, no matter how restlessly animated on the surface, is fearlessly transformed into a work of art.

While the triad of marble, limestone and sandstone dominates in European sculpture, the variety of worked stones in the Shona culture is almost impossible to overlook.

While jasper was a gem in Europe, once even called a "semi-precious stone", a fixed part of the most precious art cabinets of the Baroque era, in Schwetzingen you suddenly find yourself in front of Fungai Mwarowa, a stylized Bateleur eagle made of pure jasper, which is over two meters tall and is known as a bird of prey called "juggler" in the culture of the Chapungu has a magical role and burns up like a phoenix in the light of the evening sun while it preens its feathers.

Chenjerai Chiripanyanga also uses stone color and texture as carriers of meaning.

His stacked heads in the sky-storming "Generations" represent, each with a different gemstone in dusky pink, violet, blue, but also sulfur yellow, how one generation stands on the shoulders of the other.

The pinnacle of the almost surreal-looking treasures outside is the Easter Island-like head “Weiser Sekuru” (2015) by Benjamin Katiyo, which is also over two meters high and made of deep green verdite, a mix of serpentine and fuchsite with ruby-corundum the size of a fist that occurs almost exclusively in Zimbabwe. Inclusions in it - a semi-abstract thinker, focused on the essentials, which Rodin would probably have appreciated.

Don't be afraid of living stone surfaces

Such unruly stone surfaces that appear painted may sound playful, but they almost never fail to have an effect.

Arthur Fata's nude "Outcast Woman" crouching next to the wise men in an embryonic position, in reality a woman suffering from AIDS, is made of magnificent dolomite, which is not snow-white here, as is so often the case, but grayish with dark welts, so that the who are already plagued and crouching on the ground, also appear as if they have been whipped on their surface.

They are consistently extremely hard rocks, the processing of which demands everything from the sculptor, but which has also stood outside for decades - the oldest works on display date from the 1960s - undamaged.

As hard as it is popular, the "Zimbabwe Springstone" is not named after the season in English, but rather after the sound it makes when the chisel strikes.

Strongly ferrous as it is, it resonates tools with a metallic ringing.

And this is where sculptors like Michelangelo meet those 34 from the Shona people: it is the humility in front of the stone, the precise listening to what every vein in it wants, and also the non-finito leaving an apparent unsuitable grain direction in which the work block goes - and in the case of Tapfuma and Jonathan Gutsa even rust as the border of a torso.

For some, the eight themes such as "Tradition and Legends" or "The Role of Women" with the arduous daily fetching of water may be too far removed from their own worlds of experience.

But that would be a missed opportunity.

Chapungu.

stories in stone.

In the palace gardens of Schwetzingen;

until October 10th.

2 catalogues.

Some of the works can be purchased for the expansion of the Chapungu Sculpture Park in Zimbabwe.