Strauss & co - 10 November 2014, Johannesburg

118 161 Ezrom Kgobokanyo Sebata LEGAE south african 1938–1999 A Striding Girl signed and numbered 7/10 bronze with a brown patina, mounted on a wooden base height: 58 cm, including base R200 000–300 000 notes In 1969 Ezrom Legae became a member of the Amadlozi Group, a loosely associated collective of artists established by dealer Egon Guenther in 1963. By this time Legae had already formulated his elemental brand of figurative sculpture, which, through shifting subjects and times, he would remain faithful to throughout his life. Broadly speaking, Legae’s sculptures express little of the directness or stridency one sees in his highly regarded works on paper. This late sculpture, which shares many formal affinities with Standing Female Torso (1998), speaks in an entirely different register to his well-known Chicken series (1978), which offered the image of a fowl as a proxy for the body of murdered activist Steve Biko, or later Jail series (1981), which unambiguously described apartheid’s brutality. Solemn and dignified, this monumental bronze prompts respectful appraisal rather than outrage. In a particularly sharp overview of the art produced by black South African modernists, critic Ivor Powell in 1995 remarked how works invested with pathos and sadness never explored the cause of the suffering, ‘and thus, while such pieces certainly engage the sentiment of the viewer, they would hardly confront him or her with the actionable realities which produce the pathetic situation’. 1 It is true as a generalisation. As too is the fact that white patronage and the temperament of the market undoubtedly played an important role in limiting the choice of subjects available to black urban artists, more so when producing costly bronzes. Yet it is a measure of Legae’s achievement, both as artist and citizen, that he did not demur from addressing South Africa’s political situation, or for that matter limit himself from expressing his diverse moods. With bronze Legae found a medium both pliable enough to explore his syncretic style and steadfast enough to express his radical humanism. 1. Powell, Ivor (1995) ‘Us Blacks: Self-construction and the Politics of Modernism’, in Persons and Pictures , Johannesburg: Newtown Galleries. Pages 14-15.