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Drawing for Dying Beast
199394
Ink on paper
98-27-1, gift of Contemporary African Art Gallery, New York
19381999, b. South Africa
South African sculptor and draughtsman Ezrom Legae is renowned for his
powerful visual commentaries on the pathos and human degradation of apartheida
critique he extended to the persistence of poverty and racism in the post-apartheid
years.
Legae grew up in Soweto and studied at the Polly Street Art Center in
Johannesburg, the first public art school open to blacks. In many of his
works, including Dying Beast and Sacrifice, Legae spoke
through discomforting metaphors of injured chickens, goats, and horses
(animals often associated with ritual sacrifice in many African cultures),
which he rendered in painfully contorted postures.
In Sacrifice, the artist reconfigures Michelangelos Pietà;
instead of holding her dead son, the woman holds a dead goata metaphor
for the black activist who protests acts of violence against his people.
The drawing Icons de Dakar "Africa," with its entangled
references to urban and rural life, was inspired by a trip to Senegal,
a country that epitomized Legaes vision of the "real Africa"one
that can flourish in the absence of repression.
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