Ezrom Legae (1938–1999) was a sculptor, draughtsman and teacher whose art gave powerful and moving form to the emotional strain, vulnerability and grief caused by apartheid in ordinary life. Born in Johannesburg, he studied at the Polly Street Art Centre and the Jubilee Art Centre under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo, developing his practice within the rich creative environment that these institutions fostered in the late 1950s and 1960s. He later became a teacher at Polly Street himself, transmitting to younger artists the technical and artistic foundations he had absorbed.
Legae worked across bronze, clay, charcoal and mixed media, but it is his drawings and sculptures of the 1970s and 1980s that are most celebrated. In these works, animals – chickens in particular – become charged metaphors for human vulnerability and the experience of captivity, suffering and resistance.
His widely discussed Freedom is Dead series uses the body of a bird to address the aftermath of the 1976 youth uprising in Soweto with restraint and lyric intensity that distinguish his approach from more overtly agitational work. The indirection of his symbolism, the formal economy of his modelling and the emotional precision of his imagery combine to make these among the most powerful responses to apartheid produced in South African art.
Legae exhibited widely during his lifetime and received increasing critical recognition as the post-apartheid period brought greater attention to the generation of artists who had worked under the most severe political constraints.
He is now regarded as one of the most lyrically intense and morally resonant sculptors and draughtsmen of his era and his work continues to be collected and exhibited by major South African institutions.
