Strauss & co - 20 May 2019, Johannesburg

184 290 Edoardo Villa SOUTH AFRICAN 1915–2011 Prisoner signed, dated 1983 and numbered 3 welded and painted steel height: 137 cm excluding base, 215 cm including base R500 000 – 600 000 Edoardo Villa imbued his work with aesthetic concerns of a formal and individual nature. Although his themes tend toward the universal, they are informed by his personal experience of internment as a prisoner of war in South Africa during World War II, and the subsequent adoption of this country as his home. Villa’s Prisoner series of caged vertical anthropomorphic figures made up of alternating geometric and organic forms suggests a restrictive and claustrophobic containment. The present Lot alludes to an internal sense imprisonment within a broader notion of incarceration, of a nation enduring enormous pressures during the twenty years that preceded the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994.