When we talk about Shona sculpture we all thank and admire the work of Frank McEwen (the founding director of the Rhodes National Gallery, now the National Gallery of Zimbabwe) to promote and place the Shona stone sculpture movement to the spotlight of Europe and North America. He is also the one who organised the first International Congress of African Culture in 1962. With this occasion, among many other prominent figures of the art world was Tristan Tzara (the founder of the Dada movement) who justly said: "It was in 1916 that I came into contact with the first works of African art. I would say at that time it was a rarity; few people even knew what it was; there was great confusion; very little was known about it. But it opened very extraordinary horizons to us and even then we were saying that African art must not be considered from an angle of curiosity, but should merit the same attention as archaic Greek sculpture or another sculpture of very great art."

With this introduction we welcome you to our online gallery and we hope to pass on to you a part of our love for Shona art.

We are Teona and Mihut, originally from Romania and living in Switzerland in what someone could easily call a "self made" house gallery. It all started back in 2012 when walking through the Louvre des Antiquaires just across the street from Louvre Museum and we fell in love with a fine art Serpentine bust made by Thomas Tandi. It was that kind of experience when you see a piece of art and you simply can't stop thinking about it, especially that you might get lucky to actually buy it. And we were, even though the sculpture was not for sale at that time but, after two years and multiple visits to the gallery, we convinced the owner to sell it. That sculpture is still in our home and it is definitely not for sale!

However, driven by a tremendous passion and with a lot of research and time spent in Zimbabwe to meet the top masters of Shona fine art, to visit the mines, to make new connections and truly understand the work and talent behind, we have the opportunity to present you our online gallery with exquisite pieces selected by us and we can only hope that one of them would draw your attention as it happened to us back in Paris. Each sculpture is unique, handmade from Zimbabwe's rocks and carved in a single piece of stone. There's no wonder why sometimes a sculpture can take several months to complete…

We can all admire a Shona sculpture in our home and be ambassadors of this phenomenon that Shona art is!

Enjoy the visit and feel free to contact us for more information.