Notes

Animal subjects were a hallmark of Sydney Kumalo’s prodigious output from especially the Sixties. At various points in his career he depicted leopards, eagles, frogs, roosters and horses. However, Kumalo’s animal studies were rarely straight depictions. He possessed what Walter Battiss in 1967 characterised as a “powerful expressionist”¹ style, and confidently distorted and reduced his animal and human figures. Very often he also conflated his two key subjects, producing animals marked by their visible anthropomorphic qualities. “Most of Kumalo’s studies of animals are images of predatory power, often invested with human features,” observed Elizabeth Rankin.² But not all his animal studies were muscular beasts with human-like qualities. Kumalo also produced bronzes in which human figures interact with animals, typically as riders posed astride horse-like beasts. The power relations in these portrayals are self-evident. Yet even in these works Kumalo’s descriptions of basic features often suggest commonality rather than difference. Eyes and mouths are typically evoked with the same elementary flourish. In this particular work both the animal and human elements feature the same striated surface texture. Animal subjects were rarely benign or neutral subjects for Kumalo, a cosmopolitan artist whose work expressed metropolitan concerns. His loose representational strategies, especially in relation to his many animal subjects, must be understood in the context of their time. “In art of the period, the human figure was often put through animal transformations that indicated how [the] everyday brutality of apartheid was internalised and how it might be exorcised,” offers art historian John Peffer. “Through graphic distortions of the body and its metamorphosis into a beast, artists posed trenchant questions about the relation of corporeal existence to ideas about animality, community, and the scared.”³

¹ Battiss, Walter (1967) ‘A New Art in South Africa’, Optima. Page …
² Rankin, Elizabeth (1994) Images of Metal: Post-War Sculptures and Assemblages in South Africa, Johannesburg:                  Witwatersrand University Press. Page 132.
³ Peffer, John (2009) Art and the End of Apartheid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Page 41.