Sydney Kumalo
Throughout his career, Kumalo never disregarded figuration in pursuit of a purely formal expression. In subject, however, he seldom evoked the particular, looking instead to more universal motifs. As such, many of Kumalo’s sculptures were archetypal in image. The repetition of figures – among them a series of nude women, much like Matriarch – allowed for formal variations on shared themes. In this sculpture, the influence of Henry Moore’s early stylised figuration is evident. The woman’s form is reduced to an elegant minimalism, abstracted but not abstract. It is marked by Kumalo’s formal sensibility, which, though fluent in the language of international modernism, always spoke in a distinctly South African accent.
b.1935, Sophiatown; d.1988, Johannesburg
In a deft gesture of unanticipated re-appropriation, the artist Sydney Kumalo considered European modernist sculptures the primary influence in his aesthetic development. That many of these modernist sculptures were in turn inspired by ‘primitive’ African art objects led to some confusion in the reception of Kumalo’s work. Many recognised an innate African-ness to his sculpted forms, an inherited tribal tradition, disregarding his works’ modernity and imagining it instead to exist in some timeless vision of the ‘dark continent’. That Kumalo was an urban rather than rural artist, and that his art education rested almost entirely on the reproduction of works from Western art history books, sorely undermined this romantic reduction. His forms were not primitive but primitivist. While his South African context no doubt influenced his sculptures in subject and image, they remain resolutely modern in style. Kumalo was one of several black artists trained at the Polly Street Art Centre (later the Jubilee Art Centre) in Johannesburg under the tutelage of Cecil Skotnes and Eduardo Villa, who went on to garner fame nationally and abroad. Kumalo later became a senior art instructor at the Centre, before pursuing his career as an artist full-time in 1964.