African sculptor and draughtman best known for his powerful visual commentaries on the pathos and degradation of apartheid.

Ezrom Legae was educated at St Cyprians Primary School and Madibane High in Diepkloof, Soweto. He studied at the Polly Street and Jubilee Art Centres between 1959 and 1964 under Cecil Skotnes (qv.) and Sydney Kumalo (qv.). On the latter’s retirement in 1964, Legae was appointed art instructor at Jubilee Art Centre, later becoming co-director of that institution. In 1970, Legae was awarded a USSALEP travel scholarship, which funded travel and study in the US and Europe. From 1972 to 1974, he was director of the art programme at the African Music and Drama Association, before leaving the educational environment to become a full-time practising artist. In 1980 and 1981, he worked as a part-time instructor at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), and was Director of the Diepmeadow Town Council Art project until his death in 1999. (revisions.co.za) 

Photograph  by Fernand Haenggi

Legae is best known for his powerful visual commentaries on the pathos and degradation of apartheid - a critique he extended to the persistence of poverty and racism in the post-apartheid years. He excelled as painter and sculptor of figures, heads and animals working with oil, conté, bronze, clay and mixed media.

Head of a wise man, Bronze 32 cm

Perhaps more than any other artist associated with the Polly Street milieu, Legae’s practice as an artist is absolutely convincingly located at a cusp between African sensibility and reference on one hand, and the transcendent and universalist preoccupations of international modernism on the other. In this regard, many of his sculptures register equally the kind of abstractionist simplification of European and American figurative sculpture of the mid 20th century and the hieratic and animist charge and proportion of African traditional woodcarving. It is however his drawings and graphics from the 1970s on which his reputation rests most strongly today. In sustained exploration of themes like his series of conjoined animal and human forms, and his 1978 Chicken series, Legae generates an animist language of form in which the deferred and disembodied violence of representation, and evocation of primal passion and dislocated suffering, creates images that are memorably adequate in iconising the political consciousness of the times. (Ivor Powell)

He exhibited extensively in South Africa and held solo exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery amongst others. Ezrom Legae also participated in many international group exhibitions, winning the Honourable Mention for Drawing at the Valparaiso Biennale in Chile in 1979. In 1969 he won the Oppenheimer Sculpture Prize.

Towards the end of his career, Legae had a studio at The Fordsburg Artists' Studios (The Bag Factory) and this is where met with Mark Attwood. Ezrom Legae did this print at the Artists' Press shortly before his death. It exemplifies Legae's mastery of the drawing technique and his ability to combine lyricism and strength in a small image. A single colour stone lithograph with chine Colle. (https://www.artprintsa.com/ezrom-legae.html)

Obituary, taken from Artthrob.

South Africa lost a distinguished artist of the older generation when painter and sculptor Ezrom Legae died in Johannesburg this week at the age of 60 (1999), after a long illness. Legae received his early training at the Polly Street Art Centre and the Jubilee Centre under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Khumalo, and is perhaps best known for his powerful and emotive 1977-78 Chicken series and the 1979 Freedom is Dead series.

His work has been shown all over Europe, and was part of the groundbreaking Ricky Burnett-curated 'Tributaries' exhibition in 1985, shown first here and then in West Germany. Awards received include the 1967 Oppenheimer Sculpture Prize and Art SA Today, and the artist is represented in most major museum collections in South Africa

For my friend Ezrom

A tribute from Linda Givon, former director of the Goodman Gallery

Thirty years of working together through the heaviest time in a country shattered by the cruelest and most devastating destruction, a nation's deconstruction and reconstruction.

You taught me how to look across the wall at the people who were so desperately subjected to unspeakable horror. Your sensitivity which leapt perception as a human being as well as an artist who touched my heart and my soul.

Your courage in a time when nobody dared to speak out in 1979 with your homage to Steve Biko and in 1980 with Freedom is Dead.

Your sculpture of burnt flesh and necklaced people, tortured but always lyrical with a sense of poetry and deep sensitivity.

Your warm sense of humour, usually with a twist of irony and often ending in tears.

Your compassion and love for your fellow man, your total dedication to your children and grandchildren.

Your humility as an artist. All these make the memory of a complete all-round man who will always remain as one of the treasures of our nation. It was fitting that you were chosen to present our great President Nelson Mandela with a bronze sculpture on his stepping down as head of the ANC.

You have enriched my life and those of many others.

Bayete. Goodbye, brother. May your spirit be free at last.