Edoardo Villa
Mother & Child marks a brief return to figuration in the artist’s final decade. Unlike his late style's preference for premade steel piping, this small sculpture is made from a modelling medium later cast in bronze. It is a curiously phallic object, its form appearing at odds with its stated subject. Reminiscent of Villa’s early Cubist and Constructivist works, the small sculpture dissolves into abstraction without the guiding influence of its title, which gives shape to its object, lends it an image it otherwise lacks.
b.1915, Bergamo; d.2011, Johannesburg
Native son of Bergamo, Italy, Edoardo Villa was not at first destined to become one of South Africa’s most celebrated modernist sculptors. His unlikely journey began as a young man when he was conscripted to serve in the Second World War in 1939. Sent to North Africa, he was captured by British troops and transferred to a POW camp in South Africa, where he served a four-year sentence. Villa decided to stay on following his release, preferring the “open space” of the highveld to the “closed life” of continental Europe. “Everything in Europe I felt had been done, questioned and exhausted,” the artist later said. “Here, in Africa, I felt I had the opportunity to explore.” Villa’s aesthetic grammar was the meeting of two languages, an expression of European modernism in a South African vernacular. His work, art historian Esmé Berman wrote, spoke “not of the appearance but of the experience of Africa.” Over the many decades of his prolific career, he moved progressively away from figuration and bronze modelling to purely abstract compositions made with industrial steel. Many of these brightly coloured monumental works still mark the South African landscape as public sculptures, just as the open landscape first marked his practice.
In addition to his sculptural legacy, Villa is remembered for his contributions as a mentor at the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg during the 1950s and as a founding member of the Amadlozi Group, which championed the pursuit of a singularly South African aesthetic.