Review: Ezrom Legae’s first U.S. solo show renders quiet resistance in spare, striking lines

Ezrom Legae: Beasts, on view at the High Museum through November 16, marks the late South African artist’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition. Featuring 40 drawings and two sculptures, the show lands with quiet power, like a heavy stone in still water.

The power here comes not from monumentality but rather from intimacy. Graphite and charcoal shapes take the forms of bulls, chickens, horses, goats and dogs — the beasts of the title — their bodies often twisted in travail, labor, death or decay. Organs and sinews, sometimes difficult to distinguish, emerge in lines and shading. The effect is at once visceral (we often literally see viscera) and restrained. Legae, who once said he preferred drawing to speaking, embedded quiet resistance into his work through spare marks that evoke a world both profound and  sacred.

Born into a Tswana family in 1938, Legae grew up in racially segregated and white-dominated South Africa. He was only 10 years old when apartheid policy was officially implemented. Although there’s no direct statement linking his work to Tswana oral traditions of storytelling through parables, the resonance is clear. His drawings echo the layered lucidity of animal fables, distilling complex truths through indirect means.

Legae studied art at the Polly Street Art Centre, an institution offering technical training for young Black artists that was marked by the contradictions of segregation in a society shaped by colonial rule. Located in central Johannesburg, attending Polly Street required Legae to travel with a permit from his township in accordance with apartheid-era zoning laws. There, he was mentored by prominent white artists — a complex, fraught dynamic in a deeply divided country. 

The tensions of Legae’s training shaped a visual language that was both formally sophisticated and symbolically potent. Drawing from European draftsmanship traditions and using animals as metaphors, he critiqued power and suffering without naming them directly. The influence of German expressionism — with its emphasis on emotional intensity, distortion and rawness — resonates throughout his work, while remaining rooted in African symbolic traditions.

This approach was especially potent under apartheid, a system that violently silenced dissent. Rather than confront power with overt iconography, Legae used animals as surrogates: goats yoked or quartered; chickens plucked, bound or split open; bulls and horses felled or frozen mid-collapse. These images subversively critique apartheid and also raise enduring questions that still confront contemporary viewers: What does it mean to live, labor, suffer and die? What, if anything, remains of the soul? 

His depictions of decay and death, often abstracted, are mournful and unflinching. Among his late-career works are drawings of fighting dogs — animals and behaviors familiar from township life but here recast as post-apartheid allegories of fractured communities, a fierce struggle for survival and dominance amid a new post-colonial power vacuum.

Legae’s career unfolded during a time when South Africa’s leading Black artists were often marginalized or celebrated only when their work avoided political messaging. Legae rejected that binary. His art was political but also elliptical and oblique. Today, he is recognized as a vital bridge: trained in colonial institutions, fluent in European techniques, yet devoted to shaping an African visual language on his own terms. 

Although the show spans decades, it resists the notion of a traditional retrospective. It’s a curated sampling, offering snapshots rather than a full arc. This approach may leave viewers curious for deeper focus, but therein lies its strength. The fragments coalesce into an emotional portrait of an artist who worked quietly and fiercely across decades and through enormous political upheaval.

Beneath the surface violence in his drawings often lies a spiritual undercurrent. Amid grotesque forms, there is a glimmer of transformation and hope — a sense of life as cyclical, with the physical body not simply a vessel of suffering but a threshold to another state. Legae is remembered as a pioneer; he was among the first Black artists from apartheid-era South Africa to gain international recognition. Beasts, modest in scale, is a powerful testament. In drawings full of hushed horror and strange grace, Legae doesn’t just offer a critique of apartheid but a meditation on the human condition. His resistance endures. His works convey a deep sensitivity to suffering and resilience, offering Atlanta audiences a rare opportunity to engage directly with one of South Africa’s most quietly influential voices.

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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer.