painting

In Henry Tayali’s graphics meet at the Africa that fights for independence, but also the difficulties that people are tamped with in free Africa’s new big cities. Tayali is a committed artist. His pictures appear to be in a concomitant despairing mood, vehemently formulated comments on what is happening at the moment. He himself says: "I see people leaving their earth and village, a life with context and norms. They enter town, where they meet a very different jungle with other, or none, rules. They lose their foothold, live in sheds and they deserve so pitiful little that it does not even cover their simplest needs. That’s how grief break. My art is about the suffering of the people and I want to be the echo of this pain. I see this continent’s problems, how soon the changes take place. I record what I and my people feel. " His commitment is easy to observe in the graphic. Here are the liberty heroes and cries of justice and food, as well as the task and aggressiveness in the beer halls. In the oil paintings, the means of expression are different. His saying about it: "The starting point is man and her problem. Society vibrates with energy. These are amounts of forces that act on each other. This flows through the color of the paintings. But the finished result is due to technology, not to uncontrolled feeling." Margaret Plesner is an artist colleague of Henry Tayali. She comments on his painting like this: "It alternates between abstractions and abstract interpretations of people. It can be a landscape moulding of people, which turns into colour accents to become pure dashes and danced colours in the next picture - as a sun-sparkling sky room. His painting has something in common with Pollock and Mark Tobey, and he is now working intensely towards greater artistic freedom in the shapes' relationship with each other in the picture room. " In today’s Zambia, Henry Tayali is an enlisted artist. He teaches at the university, he sits on the board of the country’s museums and he organizes seminars and courses for young artists. He often exhibits, both in Zambia and abroad, and he is a source of power for Zambia’s art life. In his teaching at the University of Lusaka, it is important for him to interest students also for the traditional art. He has documented murals, sculpture, architecture and musical instruments in different parts of the country. He seeks contact with medical specialists and learns from them. He examines the role of art in traditional African society. But, says Tayali, it’s not about a Western concept of art or Western aesthetics, but more about how a particular drum or sculpture works in determined social contexts. Actually, he does not speak of “art” or “sculpture” but of created forms. These are power-loaded objects, used in religious ceremonies and healing processes. But also for revenge - with “created forms” one can convey evil as well as good. Pictures, as well as music and dance, are a sweet to come in connection with forces outside of ourselves, with the ancestor and with the divine. They help to maintain order, to make culture. Art is thus not a decoration on the surface of society, rather then the very foundation. “The concept of life years in the African rural community built on the philosophy and principles of the forms created.” This is how Henry Tayali sees the role of art in traditional society. Here there is a parallel to how he sees his own task as an artist in Zambia. "My art is about people’s suffering ich I want to be this pain echo.... I record what I and my people feel. " Like the traditional physician has the ability to see causes and contexts in everyday life’s oreda, Henry Tayali wants to express in his pictures what is under the surface, the people experience without being able to fully formulate it. The meaning of what is now happening in the cabinets, in the mines and at the negotiating table is gestalted in his pictures. It is thus a very serious matter behind Henry Tayali’s work as an artist in Zambia. He was born in Serenje in western Zambia in 1943. When he was twelve, the family moved to the then Rhodesia and one settled in Bulawayo. Here he got the opportunity for drawing lessons and 15 years old he had his first exhibition. It was for the second time that an African artist exhibited in Bulawayo. In his 20s, he participated in a collection exhibition in Salisbury. It then became five years at Makerere University in Uganda and four more years at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. He is now a researcher and teacher at Lusaka University, Zambia. Apart from Zambia and Zimbabwe, Henry Tayali has exhibited in Kenya, Canada and West Germany. In the international hiking exhibition "Mother art in Africa (shown at Liljevalchs in Stockholm 1980) we could see some of his graphic sheets. - “Henry Tayali Artist from Zambia.” Exhibition Catalogue, January 1982