Notes

Thanks to Dr Gavin Watkins for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

It is well known that Ezrom Legae enjoyed drawing from a young age. However, he only commenced his artistic career in earnest when he joined the Polly Street Centre in 1962. In 1965 Legae produced his first sculpture under the guidance of Cecil Skotnes. Just two years later Legae created Small Head. That same year he won the sculpture award in the 1967 Art South Africa Today exhibition for his work Embrace.¹ Despite being a mere 21,5cm the artwork needs only a glance to appreciate Legae’s distinctive capability in combining geometric and organic elements to express human form. While Legae is typically known for anthropomorphic qualities in his sculpture, the work is unique in that it references influence from botany. In a Lantern journal article written by Dina Katz (1974), Legae revealed to the author that “the original form [was] inspired by a plant” and she argues he “used this point of departure as an excuse to inter-relate facial feature and geometric form as far as he [could].”²

1.  Elizabeth Burroughs (2018) Re/discovery and Memory: The Works of Kumalo, Legae, Nitegeka & Villa, Cape Town: Norval Foundation, page 172.

2.  Dina Katz (1974) ‘A Man of Two Worlds: Ezrom Legae’, Lantern, 24(1): page 63.

Provenance

Property of a Gentleman. 

Literature

Dina Katz (1974) ‘A Man of Two Worlds: Ezrom Legae’, Lantern, 24(1): pages 55-63, referenced in text and illustrated on page 63.