Icons de Dakar "Africa"
1996
Ink on paper
98-27-2, gift of Contemporary African Art Gallery, New York

1938–1999, b. South Africa

South African sculptor and draughtsman Ezrom Legae is renowned for his powerful visual commentaries on the pathos and human degradation of apartheid—a 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 Michelangelo’s Pietà; instead of holding her dead son, the woman holds a dead goat—a 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 Legae’s vision of the "real Africa"—one that can flourish in the absence of repression.

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Sacrifice		Dying Beast