Few sculptors can boast such an extensive and successful artistic career as Jonathan Kenworthy. His precocity for drawing and modelling was evident from early childhood, gaining him a place at the Royal College of Art in 1954 at the astonishing age of eleven. Here the young Kenworthy studied amongst peers ten years his senior, illustrating a maturity and talent that was far beyond his young age.

Granted an unprecedented ten scholarships for his sculpture during his time at the Royal Academy in the ‘60s, Kenworthy used his prize money to fund the first of many study trips to Africa. Upon arriving in this vast and rugged continent at the age of twenty-two Kenworthy found there a landscape that has since inspired a life time of fascination and work.

When in 1965 Kenworthy’s works were first introduced to the London art world the landscape, animals and inhabitants of Africa were still an exotic mystery to most Westerners. Images of the continent were conjured up through grainy photographs and film or animals
held in captivity and indigenous carvings. Kenworthy was the first British sculptor to lucidly capture in three dimensions the tension, movement and fight for survival in Africa as well as the everyday scene imbued with emotions recognisable to us all. Kenworthy’s style has since been widely imitated, but he remains the first and foremost sculptor of his genre to capture Africa in all its glory.